Hey, the dead movie critic – that was my favorite part! Devoted fans of M. Night Shyamalan, rushing to their laptops on opening day to defend “Lady in the Water” from a thumbs-down tsunami of media naysayers, cited the lethal mauling of a character – a movie critic played by Bob Balaban – as the reason professional reviewers lashed out at Shyamalan’s supernatural tale.
I beg to differ. The reason “Lady in the Water” received truly risible notices (“Twerpy messianism!” – New York magazine; “Glutinous New-Age clichés!” – slate
.com; “Shyamalan’s most alienating and self-absorbed project to date!” – Entertainment Weekly) is that the picture about a lonely, stammering apartment super who finds Ron Howard’s daughter in the swimming pool is pretty awful.
The movie is long, convoluted and immersed in its own goofy mythos.
It has things in it called narfs, and scrunts, and tartutics. The characters are one-dimensional. The basic tenets of good storytelling – and moviemaking – have been tossed.
And unlike previous endeavors from the auteur – whose high-water mark remains 1999’s crafty, compelling “The Sixth Sense” – this one is tanking at the box office. “Lady in the Water,” which stars Paul Giamatti as the building manager and Bryce Dallas Howard as a mysterious sea nymph, had a middling $18.2 million three-
day opening tally. The second weekend’s follow-up was a truly anemic $7 million – a 62 percent plummet. Reportedly budgeted at $55 million, with at least $45 million spent on marketing (focused on the M. Night Shyamalan “brand”), “Lady in the Water” grossed just $32 million in its first 10 days of release.
By contrast, “Monster House,” a computer-generated cartoon from an unknown director that opened the same day, has earned more than $43.8 million. And let’s not even mention those gold doubloons in “Dead Man’s Chest.” (“Pirates of the Caribbean 2” scored $55.8 million on its opening day!) But enough about numbers.
What about Night, as he likes people to call him? What about “The Man Who Heard Voices,” Michael Bamberger’s new book about Shyamalan and the making of “Lady in the Water,” which chronicles the writer-director’s breakup with his longtime studio, Disney, and subsequent move to Warner Bros.? (Reason for the move: Disney’s production chief had dared to criticize his new screenplay and his plan to cast himself in a key role – as a writer whose book will have a profound impact on future generations.)
What about a guy who, according to the “Lady” production notes, has generated income of $3 billion worldwide for his string of spooky, twist-
ending occult yarns: “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” “Signs” and “The Village”? Well, Night needs to get out more.
Bamberger’s fawning and unintentionally hilarious chronicle of Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water” project – a story the filmmaker first told to his daughters at bedtime, and then fashioned into a screenplay – describes a man of epic narcissism. Shyamalan boasts about his basketball prowess, suggesting that with a little practice he could shoot like an NBA player.
He gets mightily peeved when an assistant he had dispatched to California to hand-
deliver a copy of his script isn’t treated with enough deference at the Disney exec’s house. (Apparently, then-production honcho Nina Jacobson was more concerned with taking her son to a birthday party than dropping everything – on a Sunday evening – to read the manuscript.)
Cloistered in his Gladwyne, Pa., estate, or on his 75-acre Brandywine Valley country farm, or in his downtown Manhattan loft, the 35-year-old multimillionaire moves in a small circle that includes his immediate family, a clutch of friends, a chauffeur, a chef and various aides and assistants.
Like the Luddite-ish group in “The Village” and the residents of the Cove, the Philadelphia apartment complex (which looks nothing like a Philadelphia apartment complex) in “Lady,” Shyamalan seems to have cut himself off from the outside world. “Isolated himself in Pennsylvania,” is how Newsweek’s Sean Smith puts it.
Smith, anticipating the box-office belly flop of Shyamalan’s latest, offered some career counseling in a recent issue. “No one doubts his talent, or believes he has done irreparable harm to his career,” Smith writes, alluding to the Disney-dissing that Shyamalan engages in, by proxy, in Bamberger’s book.
“What remains to be seen, though, is how he will react if ‘Lady in the Water’ fails. ‘Will he be one of those guys who self-destructs,’ asks an Oscar-nominated producer, ‘or will he pick himself up and reinvent himself?’ The solution, most suggest, is for him to break out of his self-imposed cocoon.”
Or he could just go out and kill off a few more movie critics.
