Most of us have seen some strange things turn up in swimming pools, including (in my own experience) hairpins, binoculars and a peanut-butter sandwich. Rarely do we find a beautiful sea nymph from a storybook fantasyland, but one can always hope, donning goggles and a snorkel until the fateful moment arrives.
In "Lady in the Water" -- a title that gets straight to the point -- such an arrival is not necessarily a serene event, even if it's ultimately in everybody's best interests. Based on an impromptu bedtime story film writer-director M. Night Shayamalan told his young children, the film merges fantasy, paranormal activity and sci-fi elements with love, faith and hope, a recurrent blend seen in Shayamalan's previous films, including "The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," "The Village" and "Signs."
In "Lady in the Water," Paul Giamatti plays Cleveland Heep, the superintendent of a nondescript Philadelphia apartment complex. Alone and down, Cleveland is still coping with a family tragedy many years earlier. Rather, he is coping with the tragedy by not coping with it. Cleveland is sad, and all who encounter him read this in his face and in the stutter he has developed.
The complex comprises numerous and disparate tenants, characters including single people and large families, the young and old, hopeful immigrants and even a cranky film critic (as if). Save for the occasional burned-out light bulb and unusually large rodent, things are slow in the complex, but we sense a change coming.
This change lands in the form a beautiful sea narf -- that's right, narf -- a translucent woman named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is living in the passageways beneath the complex swimming pool, but now must emerge to deliver a few pertinent messages. The at-first disbelieving Cleveland soon accepts Story's statement that she can not only help him find his own purpose as a human, but that her other assignment is even more crucial.
Story must serve as a vessel for helping one tenant in the complex finish and deliver a valuable book manuscript, a political and social treatise, that although unheard of now, will someday change the world for the better. Other people in the complex, including Cleveland, will play vital roles in the completion of this task, though they are unaware. By doing so, they will complete their own valuable purposes.
In the way, though, are vicious and fantastical creatures that will go to great lengths to stop Story from completing her task. The race is on, and the puzzle begins to fit together.
"Lady in the Water" is an often invigorating, hopeful fantasy that plays its themes big and broad, not afraid to place our very existence at stake, and in the hands of otherwise very ordinary folks (and one water nymph). Shayamalan enjoys this concept of ordinary people finding their extraordinary side, and it's the kind of that-could-be-me story audiences like.
The flow of the story is cluttered, though, with ongoing explanations of how the whole operation works, leaving actual, forward-moving action to try and play catch-up. Consistent exposition hampers the euphoria we should feel when characters make their breakthroughs.
Shayamalan has his fun with film critics, giving one character a line that expresses outrage anyone could be so arrogant as to assume another's intentions. Then the nasty film critic in the story meets a nasty predicament. This segment delights, if only because Shayamalan has the brass to go there, though, coupled with the fact the director also plays a humble and heroic character in the film, he may set himself up again for accusations of both thin skin and self-grandeur.
Shayamalan is in fact bold, though, and fearless concerning the concept of all-or-nothing, heroic storytelling. By handing the navigation to an everyman actor such as Giamatti -- a gifted actor who fits the part perfectly -- the director lets the rest of us in. At the risk of assuming anyone's intentions, "Lady in the Water" appears to accomplish at least half of its own, and maybe then some.
