'Lady in the Water' just doesn't float

Derived from a bedtime story, the movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
By ROBERT DENERSTEIN
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
F THE SCREENPLAY FOR "LADY IN THE WATER" hadn't been written by M. Night Shyamalan, it's hard to imagine any studio giving it the green light. But Shyamalan, who hasn't really made a terrific movie since "The Sixth Sense," has loads of Hollywood cred, which may explain how this muddled heap of mumbo-jumbo reached the screen.
The director's arguments with Disney and his disgruntled march to Warner Bros. have been well-chronicled elsewhere. As for Lady? Shyamalan evidently derived the movie from a bedtime story he told his daughters.
So here, finally, a movie in which a Narf must evade the fangs of a Scrunt, a story you've probably been hankering to hear.
Narf -- yes, it tellingly rhymes with barf -- is a creature from The Blue World; i.e., a mythic water world of sorts. This particular Narf is supposed to awaken a human, who will, in turn, awaken the world and bring about great, positive change. Of course, a fierce Scrunt -- it looks like a cross between a wild boar and a wolf -- must be subdued first. Maybe the Tartutics will help.
Say what? Yes, Shyamalan spins out one crazy bad movie, building the proceedings around a hangdog performance from Paul Giamatti, who plays Cleveland Heep, the superintendent of a Philadelphia apartment building that looks like a cheap motel. Heep discovers the Narf (Bryce Dallas Howard) swimming naked in the apartment complex pool. It's then up to him to determine who is supposed to be awakened by this angelic creature.
Trying hard
Giamatti does his best to bring a character to life in various encounters that offer little by way of credibility. Howard, who worked with Shyamalan in "The Village," does her best to look otherworldly in scenes that often require her to sit under a shower. Being from water, Narfs need water. Or something like that.
In an effort to locate the people necessary to fulfill a cockeyed prophesy, Heep must check out the apartment dwellers. Darned if Shyamalan doesn't turn up as a writer who's working on a philosophical tract called "The Cookbook."
He should have been working on his acting, but that's another story.
The movie begins with a narration that sounds as if Shyamalan were trying to channel Joseph Campbell's spirit into a fortune cookie. "Once man and those in the water were linked." Yeah, and movies once tried to make sense, too.
Perhaps to forge a conspiratorial bond with his audience, Shyamalan makes the movie's least likeable character a film critic (Bob Balaban). At one point, the script suggests that it takes a special kind of arrogance to attempt to read people's intentions, a trait attributed to Balaban's character.
It seems almost superfluous to point out that critics review movies, not intentions. More to the point, you'd think after six movies Shyamalan might have placed less reliance on expositional dialogue, much of it conveyed in what struck me as thinly veiled attempts to explain the proceedings.
Other reasons it's bad
But that's not the only reason "Lady in the Water" is all wet. The movie wraps itself in a self-protective attitude, the kind that suggests that any sort of questioning qualifies as cynicism. Hey, wanting a movie to compute is not the same as resisting fairy-tale eloquence.
As he carries out his duties, Giamatti's character becomes a kind of ringmaster, presiding over The Cove apartment complex and its residents, none of whom are given much personality. Freddy Rodriguez of "Six Feet Under" plays a weightlifter. Jeffrey Wright portrays a father with a fondness for crossword puzzles. The building's Korean residents (Cindy Cheung and Jane Kyokolu) are not only thinly drawn but also stereotyped.
If you possess an enormous capacity for suspending disbelief, perhaps you'll be buoyed by "Lady in the Water." But the movie, with its self-contained mythology, sank this reviewer's hopes. Even with a few horror-movie style jolts, Shyamalan can't get this leaden fantasy off the ground.