Fairy tale that fails to work -- Lady in the water
Lady in the water
Lady in the Water
Genre: Mystery
Director: Manoj Night Shyamalan
Cast: Paul Giamatti , Bryce Dallas Howard and Sarita Choudhury .
Storyline: Little Miss Nymphet swims out of her water home to convey a message to humans.
Bottomline: A yawn that is difficult to stifl
Manoj Night Shyamalan appears so desperate to create novelty that he slips in his latest film, `Lady in the Water,' disappointing audiences and his new producer, Warner Brothers.
Writer-director Shyamalan weaves a paranormal adventure around a swimming pool that is surrounded by an apartment complex, housing, it seems, a mini United Nations.
Rescued by nymph
The building caretaker, Cleveland Heep, harassed and stuttering in the best of times, has to learn the story of a frail water creature that Shyamalan calls "narf" from a Korean mother-daughter duo. In what first seems like a fantasy, Heep is puzzled when he is rescued by the narf, a nymph-like female when he falls into the pool.
As the tale unfolds, mostly from the Korean mother, we learn that a narf is a water being that comes out of its world to convey a message to humans, and that it can return only with the help of a human specially empowered to do so. The narf's enemy is a "scrunt." which resembles the fire-breat.
Every time, the narf wants to return, waiting for a majestic eagle from the sky to lift it out of this world, the scrunt attacks, and there are a couple of scenes that give viewers a real start.
But this is precisely Shyamalan's folly of trying to mix what starts off as a pleasant fairy tale (he is supposed to have narrated this to his daughters as a bedtime story) and a dark mystery. What emerges from this cocktail is a bizarre film that leaves one dissatisfied.
Yet, Shyamalan wants one to believe in him like the way the residents in the apartment unquestioningly take in everything the caretaker says! One has an interpreter of signs who solves crossword puzzles, an animal healer, a cynical book/movie critic (perhaps Shyamalan's way of getting back at all the unflattering reviews he has had), an Indian writer and his sister.
Shot by Christopher Doyle, renowned for his work for Wong Kar-wai, `Lady in the Water' tries to build an eerie atmosphere by mistakenly believing that lighting the set with flickering candles — or so it seems — will produce the desired effect. It does not, and the frames look foggy and unimpressive, with a microphone sometimes appearing at the top.
There are moments of joy in the movie — as when one spends time with Paul Giamatti, who is marvellous as the tortured soul, Heep. His pain at having to live with a secret and his child-like concern when he finds that he has to save the narf are brilliantly etched out.
A cameo
But unfortunately, Bryce Dallas Howard as the narf called Story has little to do except look pure and unblemished, and wet most of the time. Shyamalan has been giving himself a cameo — a la Hitchcock — in his movies, but here in `Lady in The Water,' it extends beyond that.
So wooden and lifeless that he is as the writer, Shyamalan could have well kept himself out of the frames.
Some still feel Shyamalan has promise. We have not seen that since his `The Sixth Sense,' which garnered a couple of Academy nominations for him.
GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN
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