Summer Movie Olympics, Part 10: The Man With His Head Up His Own Ass

M. Night Shyamlan has gone stark raving mad. The talented filmmaker behind “The Sixth Sense,” with each successive film, has clearly let his early success go to his head. It has become obvious to anyone paying attention that he no longer takes input from anyone, believing that any idea that comes from his mind is clearly genius. Case in point is his latest film “Lady in the Water,” which he claims is based on a bedtime story he made up for his daughters. It’s not too hard to believe his claim, because the movie seems like it was made up on the fly, and when he sat down to write and rewrite the screenplay to turn into a major feature film, he didn’t change the tale he had spun off the top of his head one bit- because everything that comes out of his head is GOLD. Or so he’d like to think. Like any other bedtime story created by a parent to put their child to bed, it doesn’t make an ounce of narrative sense. When you are a child and mom or dad is telling you these stories, it doesn’t matter if they make sense as you drift off into slumber-land. Night clearly wants his audience to respond to the movie in the same manner- he even has a scene where his hero must act like a child in order to have the fairy tale told to him, as if he is instructing the audience on how exactly we are supposed to receive and react to the movie. Furthering this notion is the FILM CRITIC CHARACTER he includes in the story- who is killed off because he is the only sourpuss nonbeliever in the entire film. Sorry, Mr. Shyamalan- you don’t get to tell people how to react to your movies and then scold them if they don’t watch them as children- you are clearly stacking cards in your favor if we react to your movie negatively.

I’m not a cynic- I cry at “E.T.” every friggin’ time I watch him “phone home.” Because I didn’t care about your mess of a movie doesn’t reflect poorly on me as a filmgoer or critic- it reflects poorly on the storyteller. It’s impossible to emotionally connect to anything in this mess of a movie.

Paul Giamatti, one of my absolute favorite actors, plays Cleveland Heep, superintendent of The Cove Apartment complex in Philadelphia. A quiet man with a stutter and a haunted past (like all the lead character’s in Shyamalan’s movies,) Cleveland discovers a girl swimming in his pool late one night. The girl is named Story (no, I’m not kidding,) and she turns out to be a Narf, or sea Nymph, from the “Blue World.” Story has a message to deliver, because Narfs can see the future and must deliver messages to man, who has slowly lost the “ability to listen” over the years. Cleveland learns all this from the shrill Korean student and her mother who live in the building, as Night piles on the Asian stereotypes aggressively. Night has said this movie is “funnier” than his previous movies. If Night’s idea of comedy is to play right into every stereotype he can find among the diverse residents of The Cove, then I’ll take the boring blandness of “The Village,” his last disasterous snoozer, any day.

Cleveland finds out that Story is supposed to deliver a message to a writer whose work will change the world for the better. The writer is played by none other than M. NIGHT SHYMALAN. Story ends up telling Night’s character that the will be killed because his ideas are too powerful, and it’s a wonder that the movie wasn’t titled “The Passion of M. Night Shyamalan.”

It gets more bizarre and pretentious. I’ll warn you that I’m going to head into SPOILER territory…but honestly. Just read this paragraph and you’ll understand why you’ll be glad you didn’t bother with this movie.

So, anyway…SPOILERS ahead.

It turns out that Narfs have natural enemies called Scrunts, which are basically wolves with grass growing out of their backs. Scrunts want to kill Narfs, but must follow certain rules, or the Turtuic- which are giant tree monkey…things…will kill them. But if the Narf the Scrunt is trying to kill is a Madame Narf…which, gasp, Story turns out to be…then the Scrunt will break the rules to kill her. The only way for a Narf to escape this fate is for a Giant Eagle to swoop down and fly her back to The Blue World. We learn all this in fractions from the Korean stereotypes. Are you still following me? Good, because it also turns out that when a Narf visits a place, people who will be important to helping it get home are drawn to the place she will arrive. Many of the Residents of the Cove turn out to be those people- Story needs help from The Healer, The Protector, The Interpreter, and The Guild. If anybody plays a lot of RPG video games and those terms sound familiar…maybe it’s just that Night has been playing a lot of Final Fantasy Games as he wrote the movie.

Most of the movie’s running time involves figuring out the bizarre rules for helping Story get home. When Cleveland finds out who he needs to gather to keep the Scrunt away, he asks for help from the sourpuss film critic, who uses his knowledge of movies to guess who in the apartment would fulfill the roles he’s described. After the critic is eaten by the Scrunt and his assumptions turn out to be wrong, one of The Cove’s tenants (all of whom buy into the idea of the Narf, Scrunt, and Tartuic without questioning the reality for a moment,) asks “who could be so arrogant as to think they could know the intentions of another person?” To which I say “How could someone be so arrogant as to tell an audience member that the reason they didn’t like a movie is because they watched it wrong?” Personally I had sympathy for the critic- who wouldn’t be a little incredulous if somebody told you there was a Narf living in your apartment, and that a Scrunt was trying to eat it?

The whole mess is totally incoherent, and Shyamalan’s attempts at commenting on storytelling itself come off as hopelessly self indulgent, while also serving the purpose of responding to criticisms towards the film before it’s come out. But the smoke and mirrors don’t work- the critic is right, victim of a Scrunt or not. “Lady in the Water” is incoherent, pretentious, and totally un-engaging.

All of Night’s collaborators do wonderful work- James Newton Howard’s score is one of his most gorgeous, and Giamatti proves how good he is by infusing his terribly underwritten character with real soul. But the whole thing is the M. Night Shyamalan show- he wants you to know how brilliant he is, that he is a “master storyteller.” Too bad he’s too far up his own ass to tell the difference good and bad choices- at this point, he seems to think, if he thought of them, they’re all brilliant. By the end of the film, when the Giant Tree Monkeys start dragging away the Grass Wolf, and then the giant eagle swoops down to pick up the wide-eyed Narf you can do nothing but stare at the screen in utter disbelief.

At least he didn’t force another twist ending down our throats.