Lady In The Water

Playing an even less suave character than usual, Paul Giamatti stars as a depressed superintendent who stumbles upon a magical sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) who seems to be the product of a drunken three-way between Ron Howard, Darryl Hannah in Splash, and E.T. With the help of a motley gang of neighbors, Giamatti tries to help Howard achieve self-actualization, a process that involves a magical flying creature, tree monsters, and avoiding a wolfish beastie. Or something like that.

At best, Shyamalan's genius for melding the fantastic with the mundane rivals that of Steven Spielberg or Stephen King, but that gift fails him here. Shyamalan's attempts at creating an ethereal, fairy-tale atmosphere are compromised by a preponderance of thinly drawn caricatures, at least one of which, a sass-talking Asian hoochie, seems to have wandered in from a Mad TV skit. Howard's strangely lifeless mystical travails, meanwhile, mostly inspires indifferent shrugs. In yet another self-conscious dig at critics, Shyamalan makes a film and book reviewer (Bob Balaban) a sour heavy. Yet Balaban's wry cynicism ends up being the film's most engaging aspect pretty much by default. Shyamalan seems to hold bitter scolds like Balaban responsible for taking all the wonder out of movies and storytelling, but with fiascoes like The Village and this shockingly misconceived, poorly executed effort, he's doing a fine job of it himself.