Mr. Movie reviews: "Lady in the Water"

I guess what M. Night is up to in “Lady  in the Water," is to make a children’s film.  It’s a silly film, and there’s this kiddie notion of some sort of wacky community comprised of an apartment building.  The whole thing is fanciful and should be taken that way.  I say this as much a children’s film as “Snow White.” Which has the first scene of someone tripping that I ever saw.

Shyamalan has made much of how this story grew out of a bedtime story for his kids. Which is what the story feels like.  You can imagine a dad inventing this story to explain to his little girl where her “my little pony” necklace disappeared to after she left it at the pool.  Well, fanciful and protective parents might do that.  Anyway a water pixie in the pool, a Narf, is the entity that stole your fountain pen grandfather gave you from his death bed, that time you wrote a letter next to the pool in Daytona on spring break and fell asleep. The film does not describe which type of Narf steals socks from the dryer.

So the Narf in this story, much like  E.T., needs to get home.  And there is a whole cosmology that needs to be invoked before she can get there.  So for her to be redeemed we all have to clap our hands and say “I do believe in fairies.” There is this syrupy storyline for a character that is a writer played by Shyamalan. It’s a horribly self-obsessive and indulgent turn in the story and I enjoyed it very much.  It goes right to the heart of anybody who has bouts with delusions of grandeur.