water works (except when it doesn't)

I'll confess that I went into Lady in the Water hoping against hope that the critics were wrong. Sure, I didn't love The Village, and I thought Signs had several major honking holes in its plot, but there's something about M. Night Shyamalan I still admire. I saw Water cautiously expecting the best and fearing the worst. Oddly enough, that fear turned out to be the scariest thing about this mostly tepid attempt to mold a modern fairy tale. Which doesn't mean it's awful—I actually quite enjoyed the final third of the film—but I did find the project fundamentally flawed.

Big spoilers ahead, so stop reading now if you care.
OK, let's extend our disbelief as far as possible. Say a "Narf," who is a clairvoyant sea nymph sent to give mankind a divine message of hope, actually showed up in an apartment complex's pool. I can't buy it that The Cove's maintenance guy Cleveland would react to her the way Paul Giamatti did. One second he's telling her she's too young and she needs to leave; the next, they're curled up on the couch together. Creepy, especially given the current national outrage toward older men picking up minors on MySpace.

(Another small quibble: The film's name doesn't fit. We never really see the Narf in the water, but whatever.)

I found the characters strangely flat and often offensive. It's bad enough that Shyamalan felt the need to give himself such a central and self-righteous role, and worse that he had two key figures, the Asian mom and daughter, act like Chop Socky caricatures. Their interaction felt like a cheap Margaret Cho routine, but with none of the heart or humor.

Bryce Dallas Howard is beautifully haunting, but her Narf makes no sense. She's sort of an oracle, but not really? And why did she suddenly go mute in the pivotal shower scene? Honestly, I spent the first half of the movie thinking about how much she looked like a young Sissy Spacek.

But if Carrie White wandered into The Cove, I'm pretty sure she'd stop dicking around and start kicking some telekinetic ass, starting with the vaguely menacing Scrunt, the Narf's terrestrial enemy.
I jumped when the hell hound pounced—everybody in the theater did—but such B-movie chills feel contrary to the subtly menacing spirit of Shyamalan's previous works. Here, the baddie is essentially a guard dog who happens to be working for the forces of darkness. (Hmmm—an evil wolf chasing a fairy tale savior? Well, Gmork from The Neverending Story just called, and boy is he pissed.)

Finally, I think the biggest problem comes down to the movie's central conceit. In case you missed the hoaky cartoon exposition before the credits, there's an old Asian bedtime story that explains the Narf's mission. Said story gives all the residents of The Cove a role to play in the Narf's return to her homeworld. News flash: A story has a beginning, a middle and an end—not just a round up of job descriptions. Can you imagine Snow White told in a similar manner: "There's a princess, an innocent. And some dwarves, seven of them. And a prince. Oh yeah, and a Queen, also a Witch." Well, so what? Verbs! We need verbs!

I can't help but think that Shyamalan was onto something really unique and potentially great at the begininng, a fable about faith set in the unexpected locale of soulless suburban apartment squalor. Given the way he treats the film critic in the movie, and the strange hubris behind his own role, I seriously think he knew this Lady was going to get trampled. Since he casts himself as the movie's messiah, it seems like he was longing to be crucified.

As I said before, the film finds its legs in the latter half, but by then I'd already stopped caring. I almost think some enterprising film geek could re-edit the flick (a la the version of The Phantom Menace that floated around the Internet a few years back) and plug up all the holes. But as the film critic laments in the movie, there's just nothing out there that's original anymore.