Lady in the Water

"We don't get it." That's what Disney executives told M. Night Shyamalan when he submitted his script for "Lady in the Water" last year. They did offer to give him $60 million to make the movie, based on his rather astounding box-office track record, but he was so offended by their vote of no confidence that he took the project to Warner Bros.

Now they're stuck with it. Despite some genuinely humorous and frightening moments, Christopher Doyle's imaginative cinematography and the sharp, committed performances of Paul Giamatti and Bob Balaban, the movie loses its way long before it reaches its unearned catharsis. The Shyamalan twist, which has kept audiences coming back for more since "The Sixth Sense," never arrives.

It's as if Shyamalan had stayed up late to watch a marathon of "The Wizard of Oz," "The Neverending Story" and Hitchcock's "Rear Window," then sat down to write a script made up of scenes and ideas taken from those films. We've seen it all before: the unfulfilled characters looking for satisfaction, the showdown between existence and nothingness, the eccentrics whose lives are as compartmentalized as the building they call home.

"There is no originality left in the world," says one of Shyamalan's wittier creations: Mr. Farber, a film-and-book critic played with a deadpan cynical flair by Balaban. Rarely has a line of dialogue reverberated with such conviction.

Giamatti, giving the movie's other notable performance, plays Cleveland Heep, the stuttering superintendent of The Cove, a Philadelphia apartment complex whose swimming pool attracts a sea nymph called Story (Bryce Dallas Howard). A pompous prologue informs us that man, who doesn't listen very well, has lost his connection with water and therefore wages war.

Shyamalan himself gives an unengaged performance as a frustrated writer, Sarita Choudhury makes little impression as his sister, while the brilliant Jeffrey Wright is wasted as a crossword-puzzle expert. "Six Feet Under's" Freddy Rodriguez, who turns up as a musclebound tenant, has even less to do here than he did in "Poseidon." Also underutilized are Mary Beth Hurt, Bill Irwin and Cindy Cheung, as a Korean girl whose mother (Jane Kyokolu) is an expert on the mythic meaning of sea nymphs.

According to Michael Bamberger's new book, "The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale," both Disney and Warner Bros. were ready to take a chance on the script because of Shyamalan's previous successes. Two of his last four films were blockbusters ("The Sixth Sense," "Signs"), and the others ("Unbreakable," "The Village") were substantial hits.

But Disney had already expressed its reservations about "The Village," which left many moviegoers feeling conned. Their unenthusiastic response to "Lady in the Water" sent him to Warner Bros., which apparently was happy to have him direct almost anything for them.

And "Lady in the Water" does feel like "almost anything." If Shyamalan offered Warner a cinematic recreation of the phone book, would they have signed off on that too?

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