I am still sorting through my feelings for this movie, and probably will for months to come. Consider this the Version 1.0 of the review of this movie. For the life of me, it is challenging to know whether to praise or pan Lady in the Water. For those of you who have seen M. Night Shyamalan’s movies (and who among us by this time hasn’t seen The Sixth Sense) they are beginning to feel a lot like Alfred Hitchcock movies. They all have a certain style to them that is uniquely Shyamalan. Generally, his movies fall into the scary/creepy/metaphysical genre. Lady in the Water is more of the same. The question for the discerning moviegoers is, “Has Shyamalan’s ambitions exceeded his talent?” This is a director not afraid to take big risks.
The good news is that this latest movie by the man from Pondicherry is far better than his last movie, The Village. Moreover, this movie definitely kept me guessing until the last moment. Shyamalan populates the movie with a cast of excellent actors who play rather eccentric, yet strangely plausible characters. Principally the movie revolves around Paul Giamatti (whom you may remember from Sideways). Here Giamatti plays Cleveland Heap, the manager of an apartment complex. The premise of the movie, of course, is laughable, but then this is fantasy. It seems that sea nymphs (or narfs) exist. A sea nymph, apparently, is an aquatic creature like a mermaid, but without the tail. Narfs apparently have an altruistic heart and periodically attempt to help humanity through rough patches. One narf in particular named Story (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who also starred in The Village) ends up in the swimming pool of the apartment complex that Cleveland manages. Investigating the odd disturbance in the pool, Cleveland ends up slipping into it only to be rescued by the narf Story.
The apartment complex is apparently in Philadelphia but it sure does not seem like it. I would have guessed Southern California. As the super Cleveland spends his days unplugging toilets and resolving tenants’ complaints. Through Story, we soon learn that Cleveland is a troubled man, who lost his family in a mass murder. The apartment complex is a microcosm of America with virtually every ethnic group adequately represented. In addition, virtually every social group is represented too. This is actually fertile ground for the hard work that Story and Cleveland have ahead of them. For they have to set in motion a set of events that will eventually save humanity. Allied against Story are beasts from the underworld. What is Story’s mission exactly? It is all unclear for a while, but apparently there is a tenant (played by Shyamalan himself) who will write “The Cookbook”. This book will someday be used as inspiration to pull humanity out of its moral and political morass before, presumably, our species devolves into phytoplankton.
It does not take Cleveland long to realize there is something very odd about Story, who spends the movie either naked, or in one of his long shirts, and who is calmest when holed up in the shower with water running over her. Through the mother of one of his tenants, he learns about the sea nymph legend. He quickly applies it to Story, for whom he starts to feel almost fatherly affection.
Shyamalan generally succeeds in making us suspend disbelief. He does it by using atypical and oddball characters. After each of them has a chance to meet Story, they seem eager to suspend skepticism too and do not seem to mind helping her out. Unfortunately, Story is largely as ignorant of what she is supposed to do to help humanity as the rest of them. Details emerge slowly through the tale conveyed by the mother of Young-Soon Choi (Cindy Cheung), one of the tenants. Young-Soon, a brassy, university attending student has to translate the story for Cleveland, often in hysterically funny ways (such as over a cell phone from a nightclub). None of it makes much sense as Cleveland tries to figure out who play roles such as “The Guild” and “The Guardian” from the legend. Somehow, he has to find those in the apartment complex who are meant to play these roles. Even so on the final night when Story must return to the underworld while risking death from a nasty beast that lives in the bushes (but can only be seen in a mirror), it’s touch and go. Mistakes happen, the story is misinterpreted, and roles must switch in a rather dynamic fashion as they try both to return Story to her world, save themselves and, oh, save humanity too. Thanks to the uniformly excellent acting and the truly strange characters running around the apartment complex, you accept that clues can be found in a crossword puzzle or can be read by a kid from the alignment of cereal boxes. Just go with the flow! Shyamalan manages to accomplish this quite nicely.
Still, there are aspects of the movie that are disconcerting and should give you pause. Was Harry Farber (played by Bob Balaban), the ultimate skeptical professor, actually devoured by the beast or not? How did Cleveland manage to hold his breath so long and find the vault under the swimming pool to retrieve the magic mud that Story needed to heal her wounds? (Yes, we do see him breathing air from an upturned glass, but sorry, that is not enough for the several minutes he spends underwater. In addition, you cannot see clearly underwater without a facemask, which he does not wear.) Is it necessary to cut to black so quickly at the end? Maybe this is part of Shyamalan’s film noir, but it does get annoying to leave so many plot points unexplained.
Still, Shyamalan manages to pull off a neat trick. Peter Jackson’s three Lord of the Rings movies spent over nine hours of cinema time showing us the ultimate conflict between good and evil. Shyamalan manages to do it in 110 minutes, yet you feel the same rush of anxiety and emotion that you likely felt as Frodo and Gollum tussled at The Cracks of Doom. For me it was not clear why I cared about some of these characters, who you only get to know tangentially at best. Yet by the end of the movie, I did care about them. And gosh darn it, with the whole future of mankind at stake, I sure wanted Cleveland to pull all the divergent threads altogether and defy the odds stacked against them by the netherworld.
I need to see this movie a few more times to see if I can fully figure it out. Interpreting the movie is as much a puzzle for the viewer as it was a puzzle for the tenants in the movie to help Story fulfill her mission. The movie also walks a fine line with being overbearing, particularly since Shyamalan gave himself the most important part (the man whose words would save humanity). I am sure many reviewers will see the movie as overbearing, overreaching and a bit of a narcissistic trip for Shyamalan. It is nonetheless fine entertainment, and not really violent, just periodically scary. I suspect theater buffs will be arguing over this movie for years. A small set will see it as an ignored landmark film, along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
My inclination is to cut Shyamalan a break, because the film sucks you in anyhow, is finely crafted and certainly is entertaining. Therefore, I give it a solid 3.3 on my 4.0 scale. A minority of you will feel like you wasted your money, but most will be glad you went.
Except for one day, our French vacation was all about touring Paris. Toward the end of our trip, we took a bus trip to the Brittany coast to view the famous island/fortress/church of Mont St. Michel, or “the Mountain of Saint Michael” for us Anglophiles. If you do not know who Saint Michael is, apparently in Catholic theology angels can also be saints. In this case, Saint Michael is none other than the Archangel Michael.
The mountain is actually a small island that sits just off the northern coast of France, where Brittany and Normandy join. As mountains go, it is more of a molehill, with rock faces pushing up a few hundred feet above the English Channel. For most of its history, it truly was an island. Lately tidal forces have largely taken away its island status. Silt and sand have effectively joined it to the continent. This is a development alarming enough to the natives that there is a large restoration project underway. This effort is trying to reverse the course of nature. If it succeeds, Mont St. Michel will become a proper island again.
It is still impressive, both as an island and as a religious destination. It is also a long day trip from Paris. We had to rise before six in the morning in order to make our way to downtown Paris to meet our tour bus at the Cityrama Offices. In order to make the trip to Mont St. Michel in one day, our time at the island was necessarily short: a few hours. It took six hours on an extremely comfortable tour bus with about seventy other tourists to get to the mountain. By this time in our vacation, we were glad to escape Paris. Our dawgs were tired after a week of touring. It was nice to spend most of the day relaxing in an air-conditioned bus and watch the French countryside pass us by.
On the trip to the island, our bus took the back roads. This gave us a taste of the French countryside that was very welcome. Cloistered farms account for virtually all of the available countryside. There are no primordial forests left in that part of France, but there are numerous small French towns populated with small stone buildings that look like they have been around hundreds of years. The French are if nothing else a tidy people. Their yards are small and well maintained and their towns clean and attractive to the eye. At the center of each small town was a traffic circle. We stopped in one small town whose name I did not capture for a hotel brunch. We were fed well with a quality selection of pastries, eggs, meats and fruits. Not all of us had English as our native language, which meant there was little conversation with others on the tour. Two interpreters were brought for the trip: one who spoke French, English, Spanish and Italian, and another one just to translate for a large number of Chinese.
Our bus was very big and very long, so I was amazed that it was able to negotiate some of the hairpin turns. In some cases, it had to block traffic coming in the other direction in order to make the turn. Eventually we descended into the Normandy coast and caught Mont. St. Michel in the distance.
Until we arrived at Mont. St. Michel, Notre Dame seemed ancient. I learned that Mont St. Michel’s modern history began in 6th century as an Amorican stronghold. It first became associated with Christianity in the 8th century with the construction of a monastery called Mont Tomb. The island turned out to be strategically valuable. With its large rock-facing cliffs, it was easily defensible. Consequently, it was not too long before it became a combination monastery, fort and church.
The island is not for the vertically challenged. Do not expect special accommodations for the handicapped. Prepare to climb. Fortunately, the climb was rather predictable and not too onerous. In some ways, it reminded me of Minas Tirith, the mythical city created by JRR Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Maybe he was inspired by Mont St. Michel. As with Minas Tirith, on this mountain the higher you were the more elevated the status. At the top was the church itself, which was plain by the standards of Paris. However, the church was not designed to be ornate. It was a church designed for a monastery. The clerics and civic officials inhabited the next level. Further down lived the merchants and the citizenry. For a time the monks abandoned the mountain and it was transformed into a prison. By the 19th century, in part due to an initiative by the French writer Victor Hugo, the Mont St. Michel the prison was closed and the mountain was transformed into its latest incarnation: tourist attraction.
In that sense, it is wildly successful. The tour buses and cars extended for a mile or more into the mainland. There were many places on the island to buy souvenirs, meals or ice cream. Yet still the island feels remote. Even in the middle of the summer rush on a beautiful day, it felt cool and windy. Perhaps the island loses much of its charm during the other seasons. It offers an unparalleled view of the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. Nearby is another smaller island, which was used as a convenient quarry for constructing the fortress. The English Channel in its immensity is to the north. Somewhere across that wide blue expanse is York.
We had about three hours to spend on Mont St. Michel. We followed our tour guide, and then bought a few souvenirs and some ice creams before heading back. We returned to Paris via a different route that took us along interstate quality toll roads. We stopped at a D-Day museum in the city of Caen for dinner. If Paris is ancient, Caen felt very modern. If I had to live in France, Caen would be a logical choice because it felt so comfortably modern, prosperous and clean. We did not return to downtown Paris until around 10 p.m., which made for a very long day.
On our last day in Paris, we had planned tours of Versailles and Chartres. Our Versailles tour was canceled the day before. However, we were able to take a RER train out there in the morning and see it anyhow, although our visit was rushed. We had to hurry back to Paris to catch the bus for our Chartres tour. Unfortunately, we beat our way back to Paris to discover that Travel Bound, the agency AAA contracted with for our tour, had screwed up. They subcontracted the tour to CityRama. Travel Bound they told us they offered the tour on Thursdays, even though our reservations showed confirmations for a Thursday tour. Instead, we hung around the fair grounds for a while, and then returned to our hotel to pack: we would fly back the next day.
Thankfully, our trip back to the States was uneventful. Our flight left Paris on time, which was good because Iceland Air only makes one trip a day to Paris. Our connecting flight in Iceland to Baltimore was delayed about an hour, but we made up some of the time on the flight back. We found the customs process returning to the United States more than a bit xenophobic. There were no less than four separate processes that jet lagged tourists have to navigate. My sister Mary picked us up at the airport, and we chose to drive home to Northern Virginia, arriving home around 10:30 PM. It made for a very long day. By the time I stumbled into a foggy sleep in my own bed, the sun was rising in Paris.
Overall, it was a good vacation. Despite the slipup with the tour, I did not feel cheated. I hope I can explore Paris in a more leisurely fashion some other time, perhaps when I am retired. We just scratched its surface. There is so much to admire about France and Paris in particular. My expectations were modest before the vacation. I got far more from Paris than I expected. I think the French deserve to be proud of their country and their culture. It is an enlightened country.
Occam’s Razor will now return to more traditional content.
Is Twitter a fad that is ending? I am seeing less tweets from those I follow, and I certainly put out fewer myself.06:29:53 PM March 08, 2010from Echofon
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