The Lady in the Water
Aug. 12th, 2006 05:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subplotkudzu
Even with the baby asleep, I'm still waking up at 4 AM. Sigh. So I'll take a minute hammer out the analysis of "Lady in the Water" that's been percolating in the old noggin.
Squirrel and I saw it despite the negative reviews, since we like everything else Night has done (yeah, I'm calling him Night - it's not that I'm hanging in his Philadelphia crib, but that I can't be bothered to find the spelling of his last name). This certainly wasn't his best work, but it's not enough to sour me on seeing anything else he's done. I can appreciate his aims, and certainly his desire to do something new, but in doing so he really worked against his strengths.
What follows contains a whole heapin' helpin' of spoilers. You are warned.
Nights previous films all dealt with the issues of men dealing with isolation and loss: Sixth Sense with Willis' status as a ghost meaning the loss of his wife and life; Unbreakable with the dissolution of his marriage and his being a superhuman separating him from humanity; Gibson's loss of his wife and faith, along with his emotional withdrawal from his family in Signs. The Village is a little different in that we're seeing the long term aftermath of how the older characters dealt with their loss by isolating themselves into their community, but William Hurt's character is very much the instigator in that, and his daughter is the one picking up the pieces.
All of the other films made that isolation visually glorious by Night's signature use long establishing shots. The vistas of Philadelphia, the PA farmland or the even the Village, hemmed in as it was by ominous woods, gave the feeling of bounded space. His use of silence made the isolation contemplative and ominous. With isolation being key, the casts are small and tight - the Village stands out as an experiment with a larger cast, but in my opinion that worked - which let Night really draw a lot from his actors.
Finally, a lot has been made about Night's use of 'twist' endings, but I think part of that is bleed over from Sixth Sense. Yes, there are 'twists', but the revelation of Jackson as the creating arch-nemesis didn't add too much to the point of Unbreakable, Signs didn't provide a lot of 'clues' that you could have guessed the endgame, and the 'twist' of 'everything happens for a reason' was stated outright - though seeing how they interconnected was fun - and the revelations in The Village were handed out piece by piece as the story progressed, so that the final one of the Villages location wasn't as important. Outside of Sixth Sense and a what was likely an attempt to duplicate that in Unbreakable, Night hasn't relied on the re-evaluating twist, for all that his audience keeps looking for one and being annoyed when it's not there.
This brings us to Lady in the Water, which shares some of these elements (again our principle character is a man suffering from loss and isolation) but the things that Night manages to do well (the sense of space, the long establishing shots, the tight cast and the intense performances (with the dutifully noted exception of Paul Giamatti)) were absent. The cast of secondary characters is sprawling. All of the action occurs in the drab confines of a Philadelphia apartment complex. There is a lot of chattering speech and very little silence. The film is busy and cramped, the exact opposite of his previous work, and suffers for it.
I expect that aside from all the heartwarming stories about how this was based on a story he told his kids, one of Night's goals was to shatter the expectations of those seeking a twist ending in his work. The information is doled out piecemeal and then explained almost immediately. The big twist is that you shouldn't trust people who tell you that they can always figure out what the big twist is. The puzzle gets revisited with each expansion of the myth. There is always more to learn, and the character's fail whenever they act all post modern and think they've figured out what's going on based on information they don't really possess. In some ways it feels like a GM slapping down players for metagaming.
I would have been much happier with the film if Night had based it on an existing myth - there aren't enough Water Nymphs and Muses scattered around the world? - than one he had just invented, since the invented myth lacks resonance and instead feels very much like, well, something a parent was making up as he went along to keep his child entertained. I refuse to slam the film for being an unabashed Contemporary Fantasy, however: I have no problem with the giant eagle coming down to carry away Story at the end, or of everyone inside the apartment complex accepting (and needing to accept) the fantastic elements of the tale. If the Narfs really did exist, some race memory might make us accept them, it could be part of her magic, whatever, but not buying into that when the filmmaker is taking it as a given of the fairy tale environment is just complaining about a genre convention.
It's not a movie I'd recommend dropping a lot of money on, but I still found it interesting, worth seeing and better then a lot of other crap that's put on the screen. Elements from it are being filed for the potential low end supers game set in M. Night's Philadelphia that's been rattling around in my brain. Because it always comes back to the gaming.
Squirrel and I saw it despite the negative reviews, since we like everything else Night has done (yeah, I'm calling him Night - it's not that I'm hanging in his Philadelphia crib, but that I can't be bothered to find the spelling of his last name). This certainly wasn't his best work, but it's not enough to sour me on seeing anything else he's done. I can appreciate his aims, and certainly his desire to do something new, but in doing so he really worked against his strengths.
What follows contains a whole heapin' helpin' of spoilers. You are warned.
Nights previous films all dealt with the issues of men dealing with isolation and loss: Sixth Sense with Willis' status as a ghost meaning the loss of his wife and life; Unbreakable with the dissolution of his marriage and his being a superhuman separating him from humanity; Gibson's loss of his wife and faith, along with his emotional withdrawal from his family in Signs. The Village is a little different in that we're seeing the long term aftermath of how the older characters dealt with their loss by isolating themselves into their community, but William Hurt's character is very much the instigator in that, and his daughter is the one picking up the pieces.
All of the other films made that isolation visually glorious by Night's signature use long establishing shots. The vistas of Philadelphia, the PA farmland or the even the Village, hemmed in as it was by ominous woods, gave the feeling of bounded space. His use of silence made the isolation contemplative and ominous. With isolation being key, the casts are small and tight - the Village stands out as an experiment with a larger cast, but in my opinion that worked - which let Night really draw a lot from his actors.
Finally, a lot has been made about Night's use of 'twist' endings, but I think part of that is bleed over from Sixth Sense. Yes, there are 'twists', but the revelation of Jackson as the creating arch-nemesis didn't add too much to the point of Unbreakable, Signs didn't provide a lot of 'clues' that you could have guessed the endgame, and the 'twist' of 'everything happens for a reason' was stated outright - though seeing how they interconnected was fun - and the revelations in The Village were handed out piece by piece as the story progressed, so that the final one of the Villages location wasn't as important. Outside of Sixth Sense and a what was likely an attempt to duplicate that in Unbreakable, Night hasn't relied on the re-evaluating twist, for all that his audience keeps looking for one and being annoyed when it's not there.
This brings us to Lady in the Water, which shares some of these elements (again our principle character is a man suffering from loss and isolation) but the things that Night manages to do well (the sense of space, the long establishing shots, the tight cast and the intense performances (with the dutifully noted exception of Paul Giamatti)) were absent. The cast of secondary characters is sprawling. All of the action occurs in the drab confines of a Philadelphia apartment complex. There is a lot of chattering speech and very little silence. The film is busy and cramped, the exact opposite of his previous work, and suffers for it.
I expect that aside from all the heartwarming stories about how this was based on a story he told his kids, one of Night's goals was to shatter the expectations of those seeking a twist ending in his work. The information is doled out piecemeal and then explained almost immediately. The big twist is that you shouldn't trust people who tell you that they can always figure out what the big twist is. The puzzle gets revisited with each expansion of the myth. There is always more to learn, and the character's fail whenever they act all post modern and think they've figured out what's going on based on information they don't really possess. In some ways it feels like a GM slapping down players for metagaming.
I would have been much happier with the film if Night had based it on an existing myth - there aren't enough Water Nymphs and Muses scattered around the world? - than one he had just invented, since the invented myth lacks resonance and instead feels very much like, well, something a parent was making up as he went along to keep his child entertained. I refuse to slam the film for being an unabashed Contemporary Fantasy, however: I have no problem with the giant eagle coming down to carry away Story at the end, or of everyone inside the apartment complex accepting (and needing to accept) the fantastic elements of the tale. If the Narfs really did exist, some race memory might make us accept them, it could be part of her magic, whatever, but not buying into that when the filmmaker is taking it as a given of the fairy tale environment is just complaining about a genre convention.
It's not a movie I'd recommend dropping a lot of money on, but I still found it interesting, worth seeing and better then a lot of other crap that's put on the screen. Elements from it are being filed for the potential low end supers game set in M. Night's Philadelphia that's been rattling around in my brain. Because it always comes back to the gaming.
