Lady in the Water

The title Lady in the Water (2006) suggests the more allusive and poetic The Lady in the Lake, a Raymond Chandler novel as well as figure in Arthurian legend. But in the case of this film, the water is in a swimming pool with a hidden chamber that extends from its drainpipe deep into the ground.

To watch this film properly, you must accept that it has no connection to reality. It is not like M. Night Shyamalan’s earlier films, which toyed with the audience’s perceptions about what was real and what was not. In The Sixth Sense (1999) the character from whose viewpoint we see the entire film does not know that he is dead. In Unbreakable (2000), the main character does not realize he is a comic book super-hero. Our understanding of these stories depends on what these characters do and do not know, and how well we can read between the cinematic lines.

In his later films Shyamalan dispenses with these deceptive points of view. In Signs (2002) aliens really do invade the earth—no doubt about it. The film builds a semi-Christian set of metaphoric connections concerning love and family and loss of faith as a way of combating, after a certain fashion, those aliens who want to get into the house.

What The Village (2004) is about, frankly, I don’t know. It suggests Joseph McCarthy and Shirley Jackson and Rod Serling. It is a singularly lifeless film, though in it Shyamalan returns once again to his original ploy of toying with perceptions—our own in the audience, as well as those of the villagers.

Lady in the Water involves a number of characters, most especially a apartment complex custodian named Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti, and their gradual discovery that a mythic creature, a Narf, and not just any Narf, lives amongst them and has a destiny to fulfill, with their assistance. Names in the film have portentous significance. The Narf is named Story, and isn’t it surprising that a struggling writer who lives in the apartment building is suffering from writer’s block? The writer (played by Shyamalan) and Story are linked in a significant way, but so is Heep linked with Story, and with others.

Lady in the Water is a filmic comic book, and as a comic book one should experience it. Rules of logic are loosely applied. It has no link to the real world. It’s difficult to imagine the world of this film extending beyond the borders of the apartment complex. The people in it are flat, two-dimensional shapes, no ciphers or symbols, just flat characters in a flat story. A hidden story, unknown to the entire human race, but preserved in a children’s story that was told by a Japanese grandmother to her grandchildren, gradually becomes clear. (An short documentary on the DVD claims that this story is actually one that Shyamalan wrote and tells to his own children, and in fact his book of the same title for children has been published by Little Brown Young Readers.) If you take the film on these grounds, it is entertaining and it makes sense, though in the end the film lacks the skill and the artistry (or what we thought was artistry) in the earliest films by Shyamalan. There are the usual twists and turns in the plot of this film, but not very surprising ones.

Giamatti is effective in his part, though it lacks much depth. He is a medical doctor who has quit his practice following the deaths of his family several years in the past--just as Mel Gibson in Signs is the minister who has given up his calling after his wife’s death in an accident several years before. In Signs, the Gibson character recovers his sense of self and his faith and at the end of the film is, after a fashion, reborn. But Lady in the Water leaves us with the somewhat shocked and ashen face of Giamatti after the Narf meets her destiny. We assume he too is redeemed, able to cope in the real world and recover from the death of his family. But we don’t know that for sure. It’s difficult to imagine how he will go on, what life or reason for living is left to him. All we know is his numbed and shocked visage. And then the film ends.

But this is a comic book, after all.