Probably everybody who goes to see Lady in the Water will have their own reason for hating it. Some people will groan at the haphazard mythology that writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has conceived for his story, a seemingly improvised backstory involving a menagerie of “narfs,” “scrunts” and mohawked monkeys. Others will be annoyed by the supporting cast of “colourful” ethnics—the six-foot-tall Korean chick, the black kid who reads cereal boxes the way gypsies read tea leaves, the blabbermouth Jewish housewife, the Puerto Rican bodybuilder who’s developing only one half of his body. Everyone will probably hate the subplot about the struggling author whose book, we’re told, will one day usher in a new era of global enlightenment, but only after he’s martyred by nonbelievers who fail to appreciate the beauty of his message—a character played by M. Night Shyamalan himself.
And me? Well, I’m biased, but for me, the film’s most problematic element is the character played by Bob Balaban, who’s the closest thing the movie has to a human villain. Naturally, he’s a film critic.
The character is named Mr. Farber. He’s a short, officious, prissy-lipped little man who I don’t think is ever shown wearing a bowtie onscreen but you just know he’s got a dozen of them in his dresser drawer. In the entire history of cinema, no movie has ever contained a handsome film critic: Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Jon Lovitz in The Critic... they’re all either geeks or fatsos. And by casting Balaban, Shyamalan continues this stereotype, even though the real-life critic the character is presumably named after, Negative Space author Manny Farber, is actually a fairly tall and rugged-looking customer. (Shyamalan throws in a second cliché by making Farber the type of person who thinks nothing of picking apart other people’s work even though he has no artistic talent himself. Manny Farber, meanwhile, is a respected painter whose work has been widely exhibited in New York and California.)
Several reviewers have theorized that the Farber character is Shyamalan’s thin-skinned attempt to “get even” with the critics who panned his previous film, The Village. (Spoiler alert: in the climactic sequence, Farber gets eaten by the wolflike “scrunt,” making him the only person in the film who dies.) It’s also possible to see Farber as a stand-in for former Disney executive Nina Jacobson, whose (pretty much on-target) criticisms of the Lady in the Water script stung Shyamalan so sharply that he wound up fleeing Disney and making the film for Warner Brothers.
But what’s most interesting about Farber is the way that Shyamalan doesn’t seem to realize that he functions in precisely the opposite way that he’s intended to. And I’m not just talking about the way that Balaban’s witty performance makes this “snooty intellectual” into the most entertaining character in the film. (The best moment in the film comes when Paul Giamatti asks Farber what movie he’s seeing that night. “A romance,” he replies, shaking his head. “Not my cup of tea.”)
No, I’m talking about the part of the movie where Giamatti needs to figure out which residents of his apartment building correspond to the archetypal figures in an ancient fairytale. It turns out, however, that he’s assigned everyone the wrong roles, and as a result, a magical mermaid-like creature he’s sheltering may die. And who does the film blame for the screwup? Farber, naturally—it was Farber’s advice that provided the basis for Giamatti’s plan.
Tellingly, Shyamalan is so intent on demonizing Farber that it apparently never occurs to him that in fact, everything Farber said was completely correct. It didn’t occur to me, either, until I was leaving the theatre, but it’s true: the only reason the whole scheme to protect the mermaid backfires is because Giamatti fails to interpret Farber’s instructions properly!
Lady in the Water has been described as the first film in which Shyamalan doesn’t rely on one of his patented twist endings. But as I stood there in the parking lot outside the Regal Cinema, realizing that Shyamalan had allowed the true martryed hero of his film to be transformed, unmourned, into scruntfood, I started to wonder if maybe Lady in the Water contained an even bigger secret twist than The Sixth Sense—a twist so well-hidden that even Shyamalan isn’t aware of it. (July 27, 2006)
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