Everyone knows that cinema is a collaborative art, but still we tend to use the director’s name as shorthand for those responsible for any particular movie. Sometimes, fairly or not, a director’s name becomes a kind of brand, and we rely on it as a guide to potential quality. And, now and then, a director does emerge who clearly has a great talent and such a distinctive voice that it’s hard not to credit him or her with the sole responsibility for a work. This is particularly true when the “director” part is hyphenated with “writer”.
In the case of M Night Shyamalan, he’s the producer as well, so he really carries the can for the movies that say “written, produced and directed by M Night Shyamalan”. And he has clearly sought to put an individual stamp on them. They are very much his movies.
But how precipitous has been his decline since The Sixth Sense, which was a remarkable movie, and Unbreakable, which was less remarkable but still excellent. Since then, Shyamalan has put out Signs, The Village and now Lady in the Water — each less interesting than the last. One is beginning to ask some frightening questions, such as: Why do his two best films both star Bruce Willis? In what mysterious way does Willis make the difference?
And now for the spoilers. Lady in the Water should be called Girl in the Water; as it is, it runs the risk of confusion with Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake — and, anyway, the “lady” in question is no lady, she’s a nymph-girl from a mysterious water world that exists under or in parallel with ours. Before she turns up in a suburban swimming pool, though, we have as prologue an animated fable about the wonderful water people and how they were alienated from the horrid Earth people, and how some ancient prophecy will get them back to save us. Or something like that.
So the girl, very tellingly and obviously named Story, appears in the pool of a complex where depressed Cleveland (Paul Giamatti) is caretaker. She is played by Bryce Dallas Howard with a sort of catatonic, thousand-yard stare; this indicates her magical qualities. With the help of an oriental woman and her daughter, who know the relevant story about such water creatures, Cleveland works out what Story’s doing in our world and why, like ET, she must go home.
That is, whenever Cleveland doesn’t know what to do next he can consult the orientals, who just happen to know precisely the story about Story he needs to hear. But there are no coincidences in the world of mumbo jumbo, are there? And, in that world, all things can be mashed together to generate mystic significance — underwater rock paintings, healing stones, vegetable beasts, magic eagles, even nasty film critics.
All stories are contrived, but the trick is making the contrivance disappear in the story itself. This is called realism, and cinema is an inherently realistic art because it uses moving pictures of actual people and places, however disguised, to tell its stories.
The trouble with Lady in the Water is not just that it is boring, predictable and laughably absurd; it’s that it is so obviously contrived. And yet we are required to believe in it, to believe in Story’s magic mission and in some redemptive vision for humanity. Frankly, even I am starting to think The Da Vinci Code may be a better bet.