8.03.2006

Lady in the Water

I saw Lady in the Water last weekend. I am not someone who thinks everything M. Night Shyamalan has done since The Sixth Sense is crap. I actually liked Unbreakable a lot more than Sense, and Signs had its moments. Lady, though, plays like an exercise in self-justification.

Shyamalan wants to tell a culturally incongruous "fairy tale" in a setting overloaded with artifice: the apartment building as a zoo of modern society. Perhaps he could have pulled this off, but at the same time, he wants to tell a "meta" story outside of the usual narrative framework. Here he is far too heavy-handed, and the result is a collapse of that narrative framework, preventing the audience from suspending disbelief and taking his fairy tale seriously.

To being with, there's the way the fairy story is injected into the film. None of the plot evolves organically, every new element is introduced and explained by way of the hackneyed wise old grandmother, who might as well have been named Madame Exposition. Surely Shyamalan recognized this as over the top, and the audience is expected to recognize this as well. After all, we're given a complete summary of the mythos behind the story as an animated short before the film begins! This has the (obviously intended) effect of removing any mystery at all from the story. The remaining mystery lies only in what parts of the story will be played by which characters. The character with the most transparent role is, of course, named Story. The characters are the story, get it?

If that weren't distractingly "clever" enough, Shyamalan wants to comment on the state of cinematic art, and particularly the corner of it he's been painted into. Subtlety not being the hallmark of this film, of course, he does this by adding a film critic as a secondary character. Played by Bob Balaban, the critic seems meant to be an object of amused scorn (and even self-referentially refers to himself as such shortly before being eaten). Ironically, I found the performance and the character the most enjoyable element of the film. He's the only character who doesn't appear simply as a puppet of the writer/director. He has no part in the fairy story, and seems to exist only to remind the audience that the "real" story has something to do with identity, and the roles created for us by, among other things, Hollywood.

It's only natural, then, that Shyamalan would place himself in a major role. I don't think he's so arrogant as to expect us to take his role in the fairy story as the savior of the world as analogous to his role in the meta story, but his presence is another indication to the audience that the fairy story is just a vehicle to get to the points he's trying to make. If the fairy story is just a vehicle, though, how is the audience to take it seriously? Suspension of disbelief takes effort. We have to believe there will be some payoff for it, and Shyamalan neither promises, nor delivers any, aside from a few easy scares. The fairy story unfolds exactly as we're told it will before the title.

The result is that the audience spends most of the film nearly embarrassed by the absurdity of the fairy story, which rather severely undercuts our interest in taking what Shyamalan has to say in the meta story with anything less than a big grain of salt.

Technically, of course, the film is terrific, with excellent use of the confined spaces and indoor/outdoor contrast of the complex. Outside of shots of television suggesting war and terror in the outside world, we never leave the confines of the poolside apartments, and it's a credit to Shyamalan that the setting never gets boring. It's just too bad there wasn't a more interesting story, fairy or otherwise, to tell there.

Charlie Card Rant #1

The MBTA's transition away from monthly passes and tokens to the Charlie Card is so far a complete fiasco. I'll save my rant about the Rube Goldberg-style gates for another day, but the way they're managing the switchover has to be about the least optimal way they could have done it.

The stations are being converted in a seemingly random order, with no posted information on which stations are converted and which ones aren't. This wouldn't be so bad, except that other than monthly passes there is no common fare between the stations that are converted and those that aren't. Did you do what the MBTA ceaselessly bothers you to do and buy a token for your return trip? If your return trip starts at a Charlie Card station, you're out of luck. Same with the poor tourist who buys a "stored value card" and discovers it's useless at some of the most popular stations on the T.

I honestly can't believe they thought this was something consumers would appreciate, especially in summer: Boston's tens of thousands of tourists have enough trouble figuring out the T when it's not partitioned into two totally incompatible fare systems.

There have got to be half a dozen completely practical (if slightly more expensive) ways to deal with this. Why not have a single portable Charlie Card reader at every station that hasn't been converted? You could put it by the gate used for senior/student fare and exact change, where the collector could monitor its use. We know they have these portable card readers on all the Silver Line buses (and soon all buses, presumably), so why not order a dozen or two so there's a universal payment system. Ditto for leaving a temporary gate at converted stations that still takes tokens.

I want a modern system: stored value cards will save me money since I buy a monthly pass mostly for convenience. But the way the transition is being handled makes me wonder if this conversion isn't going to end up as a white elephant.