toledoblade.com --

Lady in - yawn.

(Pardon me.)

Lady in the - zzzzzz.

(Excuse me again.)

Just got back from Lady in the Water, the much-awaited new thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, and pardon me, but it's based on an ancient bedtime story that apparently works better than it intends.

The sleep-inducing part, I mean. You know, that ancient bedtime fable about scrunts and narfs and the Great Awakening (how apt) and a Philadelphia apartment complex containing a portal to another world - a better world, a world only Shyamalan sees.

Watching, you get the distinct feeling that he is making this up as he goes along, which is more true than you might realize: The "new Spielberg" and "new Hitchcock" of our generation (according to various newsweeklies), the talented director behind blockbusters The Sixth Sense and Signs, adapted Lady in the Water from a bedtime story he told his kids to put them asleep, who apparently brush aside the complexity of Goodnight, Moon for something lighter like The Lord of the Rings.

I wonder if he ever tucked them in and as they were fading off to sleep, the last line in their heads resonating ever so sweetly with, "A scrunt will do anything to kill a madame narf, even forget fears of the Taturtic."

Lady in the Water

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. A Warner
Bros. Pictures release, opening today at Cinema De Lux
Franklin Park, Cinema De Lux Maumee, and Showcase Levis Commons, and rated PG-13 for some frightening sequences. Running time: 120 minutes.

Critic’s rating: *

Cleveland - Paul Giamatti
Story - Bryce Dallas Howard

Shyamalan's most self-absorbed and uninvolving picture to date, what we have is a flick about a vast - dare I bring to mind the great fiascoes of Kevin Costner - water world. But perhaps for fear of bringing to mind that other storied disaster, Shyamalan's fanciful land is called the "Blue World." But lo! Hark! We are blessed! The water people could have chosen an easier place to show themselves to mankind - I hear Cancun is popular right now - but no, they've spent centuries burrowing through the earth and a Philadelphia sanitation system.

Once again, lo! For the prophesy of this blue world is laid before us in an animated cave-drawings prologue so tedious and needlessly complicated, the bells and whistles in your head are going off from the first frame. The inhabitants of the Blue World are trying to warn us about something.

When the film was over, I was still trying to figure out what exactly they wanted to say, other than, don't make war and, please, will you people change the chlorine? But whatever it is, characters who appear to be normal citizens of Pennsylvania never question any of it and are now having conversations like, "Do you get sick every time you tell me a piece of your legend?"

To which a mermaid replies:

"A great storm is coming."

I don't get it, either. And still, it takes Paul Giamatti, as an apartment superintendant charged with protecting a nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard, of The Village) nearly two hours before he's uttering self-implicating dialogue like: "They said the universe would line up, reveal itself, give us a path. Why isn't it working?"

Might I suggest Exhibit A:

M. Night Shyamalan.

Giamatti, as usual, brings rivers of empathy to a sad sack. The film is shot by cinematographer Chris Doyle (of Wong Kar-wai's movies) in an evocative twilight. There's (wisely) no twist this time. And there's nothing wrong with inventing a contemporary legend; George Lucas pulled it off fine.

Except, Lady in the Water is a fairy tale without magic (even with all the mermaids in swimming pools), a horror movie without tension; also, an ethnic comedy (the crazy Korean family who turns stoic); a character study (Giamatti's Cleveland Heep); a deconstruction of genre conventions; lots of spiritual, middle-distance gazing off; and a plot that plays like a geeky retake on Splash.

So, what happened?

Sitting here on my desk is a copy of the tell-all (or rather, tell-Disney) from journalist Michael Bamberger, The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale - a Shyamalan-approved account of how short-sighted Disney executives rejected his Lady screenplay, so he shopped it to Warner Bros. It is one of the most grandiose, unintentionally hilarious acts of public ego-stroking in ages. It reveals a filmmaker who has lost all perspective, who's been sipping his own Kool-Aid, who severs ties with a studio when an executive attends a birthday party with her son rather than read his script - on a Sunday.

Does any of that matter?

Not normally; show business self-aggrandizers are a dime a dozen. But the aura of self-importance and fussiness around this thing chokes it dead. It's as if doubting the fantasy is the same as doubting Shyamalan and doubting creativity itself.

And how do I know this?

The bad tenant is a skeptical movie critic. He threatens Story - that's the nymph. And her mission? To find a writer whose work will change the world. This writer is played by, oh yes, M. Night Shyamalan.

Ego problem?

Nah. What ego problem?

It's a God complex.