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Rating: The most painful film in Shyamalan's now extensive filmography.
"Lady In The Water" comes after countless box office and critical successes ("The Sixth Sense," of course, but also "Signs," "The Village," and "The Unbreakable"), yet good M. Night has to face numerous problems with Disney, which does not approve the script for the work. Shyamalan slams the door, and signs with Warner. The box office success will be scarce, but the film is truly very beautiful.
Faith, or rather the loss of faith, seems to be once again, as it was in "Signs," the central theme of Shyamalan's work. No aliens this time, though. It all begins when a quiet hotel superintendent, Cleveland Heep (played by Paul Giamatti - "The Truman Show," "Saving Private Ryan," "Man On The Moon," "Planet of the Apes," "Paycheck," "Cinderella Man"), finds a beautiful girl, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard, the beautiful daughter of Ron Howard and Shyamalan's favorite actress, who he also wanted in the previous "The Village") in the hotel pool. Cleveland is a quiet man but devastated by the loss of his entire family (hence the loss of faith following adverse events, which now seems a distinctive trait of the Indian director's works), and Story's arrival will upset his modest and simple life. Through a hotel tenant (Cindy Cheung) and her grandmother, Cleveland discovers that Story is an aquatic creature (a Narf) from the "blue world" sent to make contact with a man (played by the director himself) and reveal to him that the world is about to change for the better. Cleveland will involve the hotel's tenants to protect Story from the attacks of a horrid dog-like creature (the Scrunt), which wants to prevent her from returning to the blue world once her mission is accomplished.
Giamatti is amazing in this film; he delineates the distinctive features of a character with almost embarrassing fragility, capable of seeing in Story perhaps the daughter he would have wanted and is no longer there ("but you're a little girl!" he exclaims when he finds her half-naked on the sofa), so he will do anything to help her, including believing at first a frankly improbable story. Shyamalan, shamelessly attacked by critics for taking up acting (precisely accused of egocentrism, as if it were heresy for a director to personally outline the essence of a character to ensure the result is faithful to the idea, when Beyoncé is passed off as a great actress), carves out a key role in the economy of the film, being the engine of global change through a book written almost as a joke.
The direction is technically excellent (the grand finale shot from underwater is splendid), and it conveys the idea well, managing to make the interaction between fairy tales and reality appear rather realistic, which is certainly not easy. Of course, the plot's progression may not be the height of originality, but the usual, amazing delineation of the various characters (Shyamalan is brilliant at this) perfectly captures the spirit of the film. These very characters, all part of a multi-ethnic community, are (indeed, the) key to a world finally capable of improving itself. A message the director tries to imprint well within the film's plots.
An incredibly and unjustly underrated work, "Lady In The Water" succeeds in striking and communicating messages in an original and unconventional way, a fundamental characteristic of the Indian director's works.
A film to reevaluate.
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