There are two types of cinema audience; those looking for enlightenment
and profundity from a flickering projector (the armchair romanticists) and those who take trivial pleasure in its degradation and disparagement (the dead-eyed pragmatists). M. Night Shyamalan knows this, and with his strewn of mainstream pictures he has unwittingly become the world’s leading enforcer in their separation.
As many can guess, words like ‘separation’, ‘division’ or ‘half’ alongside words such as ‘audiences’ often summon tumultuous bowel movements from within The Machine (or Disney, as it’s sometimes known). Once Shyamalan’s biggest supporter (The Sixth Sense made them a shitload), Disney’s backing has dwindled with the increasing befuddlement surrounding his projects, and bitterly the director and studio parted ways over his latest. Ghosts, it seems, are more lucrative than thinly veiled discourses on lost innocence, the violence outside and spiritual salvation, such as Lady in the Water.
Still, this is nothing new for the director, writer, producer and now fully-fledged cameo-actor; supernatural disruption of youthful idealism has been his bread and butter. Yet Lady… goes further than most, as it is, arguably, as much about its audience as it is about its characters. Paul Giamatti, now everyone’s favourite middle-aged man, plays a superintendent for a block of ‘paper-walled’ apartments. Giamatti’s amiability and his character’s prominent stutter carry the soggy narrative so that it needn’t feel so damp. Quick summary: Man with a haunted past (not that way) finds a ginger water-nymph named Story (of course) who is being stalked by huge grassy dogs. If Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) refuses to look beyond reality, or if people choose not to believe, or if a far-reaching nursery-rhyme / prophecy isn’t fulfilled, she’ll be eaten to bits, severing a prosperous bond between mankind and the waterykind.
Lady was adapted from a children’s bedtime story Shyamalan himself thought up, and it never goes as far as leaving that fact behind. Yet where the director’s strength lies is with his subtle, polished, post-Hitchcockian delivery. As naturalistic as his films seem (there’s nothing like long, static cinematography to bring out the emotional layers) he can take even the most mundane story and give it a deeper meaning. Stories of aliens, monsters and ghosts are hardly revolutionary; it is Shyamalan’s intelligence and heart that makes it work. Or perhaps not.
They’ll be no cigars given to those who can find fault here, particularly noteworthy is Shyamalan’s staged mauling of the lifeless, cynical, blinkered Film Critic - the only person who doesn’t go along with the story is murdered - and Shyamalan’s own not-so-subtle swipe at his former studio, casting himself as a misunderstood writer who will be later be revered, and maybe dead. Take that! er, Disney…
At one moment in the film, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is asked: “Why is it that, in movies, burgeoning lovers always kiss in the rain?” to which he replies “Isn’t it a metaphor for purity, hope… starting anew?” The question is a rhetorical one, and is perhaps Lady in the Water’s main purpose in asking. Sadly, because Lady is a children’s film too complex for children, or because it’s a comment on innocence in a world too concerned with seen-it-all aloofness, or simply because it isn’t ‘visceral’ enough for those looking for a cheap scare… it’s unlikely to find an audience. Still, Shyamalan has proven that he isn’t simply a one trick pony (there’s no twist here); and he remains one of mainstream cinema’s most original and talented writer / directors. But his latest effort, despite it’s optimism, honesty and craftsmanship, will, for many, tread the icy waters of scoff. And clearly he has a thing for Bryce Dallas Howard’s legs.