Lady in the Water is a story originally conceived by Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan for his children. It’s a modern fairy tale about an unassuming building manager, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who saves an ethereal young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) from danger only to discover that she a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the perilous journey from our world back to hers. Heep and the tenants of the apartment complex work together to protect their new delicate friend from the scrunt, a deadly creature who is determined to prevent her from returning home.
The Lady in the Water is easily the oddest and most audacious film of the summer blockbuster season. Shyamalan is one of the most successful directors of the last decade, having huge hits with films like The Sixth Sense and Signs that were heavy on atmosphere and surprising plots twists but in Lady in the Lake he plays it straight, more or less. Don’t expect a twist at the end—the last Shyamalan film, The Village, was ruined for me because I spent the whole movie anticipating the twist and never connected with the plot—but the story isn’t exactly clear-cut.
The viewer is asked to follow a fable that unfolds slowly, and is filled unusual characters and strange mythology. It’s the soul of the movie and it will either work for you or it won’t. I thought the mythology was a bit too contrived, and a little bit too much like watching a long game of Dungeons and Dragons, complete with narfs, beasts, guilds, and healers. The intricate fable slows down the story, getting in the way of the moral—that people should consider their purpose on earth—and gets increasingly ludicrous as the movie plods along.
The main reason to watch is to see good actors doing good work. Paul Giamatti hands in another likeable performance that shows why he is one of the best actors working in mainstream movies today. Bryce Dallas Howard as the title character has a naturally brittle otherworldly look that works very well. In supporting roles Bob Balaban is amusing as an self-important film critic (is there any other kind?) who meets a nasty end—I’m sure Shyamalan enjoyed writing that part after the lambasting he took on his last film—and the director himself takes on his largest (and most ego stroking) part to date as a writer destined to become a prophet of sorts.
Lady in the Water is a frustrating movie. It’s not awful by any means, it has good performances and it looks beautiful, but it isn’t really successful either. What’s missing here is a strong hand in terms of interesting story telling. At it’s best it is a refreshing attempt to steer a summer blockbuster into more interesting ground, but at it’s worst does what all bedtime fables are supposed to do—put you to sleep.
Bryce Dallas Howard broke one of acting’s cardinal rules when she took on the role of Hilly Holbrook, the socialite segregationist in the film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best selling book The Help. It’s always said that an actor cannot judge the character they are playing. Doing so erases any chance of finding the character’s humanity.
“I think they say that for a reason,” she said in a recent interview in Toronto. “I didn’t listen and I did judge her and it was really hard for me to create a real human being for a very long time. It wasn’t until just before shooting that a few things pieced together in my head that made me say, ‘Oh man, this is why she is this way. I can play that. I can play that person.’”
“That person” is the villain of the piece. Set in the weeks and months leading up to the 1963 death of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, The Help is the story of a young writer (Emma Stone) who goes against convention—and Hilly, the town’s most outspoken racist—to tell the stories of the settlement’s African-American maids (Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer).
“She’s the character you love to hate [in the book] and I was really excited to play her,” she says. “But then I got to Mississippi for rehearsals and I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t play a kind of Cruella de Vil version of this woman.’
“This is a character based on not just several women of the time, but the majority of women, and if I didn’t get into her psychology then I was not really portraying the devastating honesty of the people at that time. So I had to get how she ticked.”
Shooting in Greenwood, Mississippi helped her find the character.
“Greenwood, Mississippi happens to be a really well persevered town,” she said. “When you are there the aesthetics of what you are surrounded by is so out of the ordinary because you really feel like you are walking around in the 1960s. The houses look exactly the way they did back then. To the eye it is really beautiful, and I think that was captured in the film, but making this movie and shooting there was eerie because it felt like, while the people were so great and embraced us, aesthetically you felt like you were in a place where nothing had changed.
“Then of course, if you know the history of that era, I mean, Greenwood, Mississippi, in particular, was really the hotbed of the civil rights movement. It’s where the White Citizen’s Council was. Emmett Till was a young boy who was murdered by a group of white men, which was kind of in a way the beginning of the civil rights movement.
“You couldn’t forget that. It made everything extremely real to all of us. If we were shooting in a soundstage in Los Angeles it would have been easier to escape at night or in between takes, whereas shooting there we couldn’t escape what the movie was about.”
Playing the prejudiced Hilly as a combo of “queen bee” and “power hungry woman with a duplicitous nature,” Howard was struck by the immediacy of the film’s story of racism and segregation.
“This was just my parent’s generation,” she says. “That was so recent. On the one hand it is great to see how far we’ve come but we have to remind ourselves that we are very, very close to it and can easily slip back into that mentality.
“I have a four-and-a-half year old son and I’m pregnant now and I think about the things that my children will grow up and say, ‘I can’t believe that was an issue.’ My prayer for myself is that I’m on the right side of history. That I can say, I did something, that I contributed to the evolution of my country.”
50/50, as Kyle (Seth Rogen) says, is pretty good odds. “If you were a casino game you’d have the best odds!” But he’s not a casino game, he’s Kyle’s best friend Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
Twenty-seven-year-old Adam is a clean living guy. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, he even recycles but yet after having some back pain a routine check-up reveals he has a rare form of cancer. The main people in his life, girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), best friend (Seth Rogen) and mother (Anjelica Huston) all react in their own, distinct ways. Only two fellow chemotherapy patients (Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer) seem to understand what he is going though. A bubbly but inexperienced therapist (Anna Kendrick) provides some comfort, but may not be able to keep a professional distance.
Cancer is no laughing matter, we all know that. But “50/50” breaks taboos left and right, using Adam’s cancer as the basis for a comedy. Luckily it’s tempered with great performances, a smart script and real emotion. There’s no a false moment thanks to a script written by Will Reiser, the real life inspiration for the story. Reiser, a pal of Seth Rogen (who also produced the movie) and cancer survivor, finds just the right balance between mortality, romance and cancer jokes—one character says the more syllables the name of your tumor has, the worse it is—in a script that will have you laughing and crying at the same time.
Gordon-Levitt is the film’s centerpiece, giving a natural, authentic performance as a person facing his own mortality even though he can’t quite believe he’s in that situation.
Rogen, not surprisingly, is the comic relief. Once again, after getting sidelined by super hero movies and the like, Rogen is doing the work that reminds us why we liked him in the first place. As Adam’s skirt-chasing best friend he’s lewd and rude but he’s also brimming with warmth. His talent is his likeability.
The rest of the cast performs well. Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to be making a career of playing villainess characters, brings her a-game. Ditto Angelica Houston who breathes life into Adam’s over dramatic mother. Kendrick also impresses as the therapist in over her head both professionally and personally.
“50/50” is a unique film. It takes a realistic approach in portraying a cancer patient’s life, but doesn’t forget to present a fully rounded view. It never pokes fun, but also doesn’t deny its darkly (and not so dark) humorous moments.
