The Next Spielberg - M Night Shyamalan

Yes, Newsweek declared M. Night Shyamalan to be the next Spielberg. It seems foolish now, if not outright laughable. But I was there. I was in the cinema. I was watching his movies. Back in the early 2000s, the Shyamalan Supremacy was a genuine prospect.

Born in the small town of Mahé in India, Manoj Shyamalan returned with his parents to the US in 1970 when he was just six weeks old. His family raised him in small town Pennsylvania where he encountered the kind of prejudice an Indian boy might face, but he toughed it out, excelled at school and won a scholarship to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He longed to be a film-maker and spent his childhood making Super 8 movies.

While at university, he made and released his first movie, Praying with Anger, a semi-autobiographical affair. His second film, Wide Awake, was completed in 1995 but due to disagreements between Shyamalan and Harvey Weinstein, it wasn’t released until 1998. The release was only secured after Shyamalan sold his spec script for The Sixth Sense for three million dollars and the proviso that he also direct, so Weinstein could cash in on name recognition (or so it is said).

The rest is history. The Sixth Sense was a massive, massive hit, raking in $670 million on a $40 million budget. It made a star out of Shyamalan and brought him the kind of cachet which would allow him to make whatever projects he wanted. Looking back, I think The Sixth Sense still holds up well. It’s creepy in the right places. The performances are good. The logic of the story gets a bit borked on repeated viewings, but your first time through is hella good.

So, with this huge hit behind him, Shyamalan got back to work, directing Bruce Willis again in Unbreakable, a very curiously paced superhero movie. It’s a decent effort. Then, in 2002, he wrote and directed alien invasion movie Signs, with Mel Gibson in the lead. I thought Signs was fantastic at the time, and so did critics and the general public, and it was another huge hit. Again, when looked at more closely, the logic in the story is just a bit broken, but never mind.

Onto 2004’s The Village, and once more I really enjoyed the weird tone and texture of the story. Another success, a lesser one, and another story with slightly off logic. You’ll either love the big twist in the third act – I thought it was cool at the time and on rewatching hate hate hated it– or it’ll sour the movie for you. The Village also brought us Bryce Dallas Howard in her first major role.

We come to his most forgotten movie. And we’ll get back to it. Lady in the Water marked the point where the wheels started to fall off for Shyamalan. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t a hit. In fact, it is the only true flop in his career. All of his other projects were hits, made a profit or broke even.

After it, Shyamalan made The Happening, which is quite possibly one of the most ridiculous and idiotic films you might expect to see. Any time you cast Mark Wahlberg, the meathead’s meathead, as a teacher and the plot features the world’s flora getting their revenge on humanity, you can’t expect it to be taken seriously.

And after Shyamalan followed it with the much derided The Last Airbender in 2010 and the critically scorned After Earth in 2013, the studios had had enough of indulging his big-budget blockbuster bullshit tendencies and he had to go back to the source – thrillers, horror, and low-budget ones at that. He’s doing what he knows works and people go and watch his movies again and I’m stoked for him.

Lady in the Water…the first script of his that Disney decided against putting into production. Here we go…

Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is the superintendent of an apartment complex in Philadelphia. Someone has been swimming in its pool at night, against the rules. Heep discovers the culprit: a naked young woman, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) who first saves Cleveland from drowning before claiming she is a narf (think sea nymph) from the ‘Blue World’. Cleveland saves her from a weird plant-wolf hybrid called a scrunt.

Story claims she has been sent to find a Writer, in whom she will inspire the creation of a book which will save humanity. This Writer turns out to be complex resident Vick (Shyamalan himself, in one of the most ill-advised and arrogant casting choices ever). With a Story having just met a Writer, the narf can now return home, born aloft by an eagle.

It turns out that another resident, Young-Soon, knows what a narf is and tells Cleveland it comes from the bedtime stories her mother told. These stories detail how a scrunt usually won’t attack narfs unless it is a rare Madam Narf. The scrunt prevents Story from returing home, and almost kills her, because (of course) Story is the Madam Narf.

Cleveland mobilises the complex’s oddball residents. Story needs a Guardian to protect her, a Guild to use their hands, a Symbolist to interpret mysteries, and a Healer. Cleveland first chooses the wrong people for these roles but eventually realises he himself is not the Guardian but the Healer, the correct Symbolist is the old Symbolist’s son, and the Guild not a gang of layabout smokers, but seven young ladies who live in the complex.

While all this is going on, Story is attacked and almost killed by the scrunt (again), healed by Cleveland (again) and escorted by her new gang of mystical supporters out to the pool, to await the giant eagle who will carry her home. The scrunt appears, but this time so does the Guardian, in the form of the complex’s oddball one-sided bodybuilder, Reggie. With the scrunt suitably cowed and then restrained by a trio of weird ape-things, Story is swept into the sky and away by the eagle.

All of Shyamalan’s movies, beginning with the Sixth Sense up to this one, share common features. There will invariably be a child or child-like character. Shyamalan will attempt to use escalating tension and jump scares. The big feature, which is either ends up frustrating or entertaining, is the good old bait and switch twist.

Everyone knows that moment in The Sixth Sense and Shyamalan executes it perfectly. Unbreakable builds up to its eventual revelation and climax incredibly slowly. Signs plays things pretty straight, while the big twist in The Village is wild but simultaneously a huge cheat. Lady in the Water…is built different.

For one, it is deadly dull. There are no stakes. Nothing feels at risk, or at least, nothing for the viewer to care about. While Giamatti plays Cleveland with a beautiful humanity, his detachment from the lives of others renders him a rather flat choice as the protagonist. He does get an arc and he does grow as a character, but Shyamalan cheats to do so. Heep has no compelling reason to care about Story, or to believe anything she says, but he does.

Story herself is also a poor character. Here, an otherworldly detachment at least makes sense, and Dallas Howard does her best to be mystical and ethereal, but, again, Story barely exists on the page as a character and so is gossamer-thin on the screen. It’s hard to care about a character who barely seems part of the world. She doesn’t ever do anything – she is entirely passive in a movie named after her, but everything she says is treated as though she hands it to people written on slabs of gold.

We can trace these issues back to the screenplay. Shyamalan based it on a series of bedtime stories he told his daughters and tried to develop them into a new mythology, or a new fairy tale. But fairy tales and mythologies don’t just spring into life over the course of a few night-times. They pass through the mouths, ears and minds of generation after generation and absorb meanings and purposes all their own. They have value beyond simply being stories – fairy tales are intentionally educational and many have sexually explicit meanings. Legends and myths flow and take new shapes and become foundational parts of how cultures define themselves and understand the world. They resonate because they contain universal moral or ethical truths.

Lady in the Water represents Shyamalan’s attempts to shape his bedtime stories into this kind of greater, more broadly applicable truth. Sadly, I think he built this particular house on sand. For starters, only Young-Soon and her mother have any kind of cultural connection to ‘narfs’ and ‘scrunts’ and ‘tartutic’. This renders the two Korean women into dispensers of exposition. Shyamalan had all of the world’s mythologies to play with and riff on, and instead chose to just make up his own, and ground the story in nothing.

This is symptomatic of a much larger issue in the screenplay. Shyamalan chose to ignore the central tenet of good screenwriting – show, don’t tell – and this is most evident in how Cleveland and Story are presented. While Lady in The Water has a beautiful, well-meaning heart, it has absolutely no head. Every single relevant bit of information is told to the audience in dialogue, and never once shown. If the screenplay had been competently written, then Cleveland’s arc would have been magnificent, an emotional journey worth taking. We never once see him struggle with his inner wound until the climax. There are no momentos of his past to linger on. We get told what his inner wound is in a very pat scene and this robs the story of any meat or depth.

Further, Shyamalan decided to abandon conventional story structures while writing, giving the film a sluggish bagginess. Things don’t happen because they follow logically one from the other. They happen because Shyamalan needs them to. ‘And then’ is an awful motivator of story. ‘Therefore’ and ‘but’ are much stronger. Lady in the Water is mostly motivated by ‘and then’.

Putting aside the massive issues with structure and the lack of logic in the screenplay, there are other problems. I didn’t even mention Bob Balaban and his role as a mean-spirited, cynical film critic while summarising the story. He exists solely for Shyamalan to swipe at critics by having the scrunt kill him late in the movie. I am going to go back to Shyamalan’s decision to cast himself as the Writer, Vick. Remember, Vick will write a story which will inspire a boy to become a transformational figure in American society. There is nothing wrong with a writer-director creating such a character. Yet for Shyamalan, a writer-director who had long been attracting criticism for the apparent shallowness of his work, to then cast himself as this mighty man of letters was an act of pompous, shit-headed, smug-faced arrogance. As if creating an appalling critic character wasn’t dumb enough, Shyamalan playing Vick himself stands as an enormous ‘fuck you’ to media commentators as a whole.

I’d normally sum up and conclude at this point, by reiterating how dull, uninspired and pointless Lady in the Water is. I’d probably also point out that for all of its narrative flaws, the acting is as strong as usual for a Shyamalan movie – including this film, his major movies were all marked by his ability to get good performances out of marginal actors like Bruce Willis – and I’d note that visually, it’s a gorgeous movie too, and the scrunt has an awesome creature design. But…

In honour of M. Night Shyamalan, here comes the twist.

There is a book, by sports writer Michael Bamberger, who had unfettered access to Shyamalan during preproduction and production. The Man Who Heard Voices. Oh boy. Oh my God.

Despite the best efforts of Bamberger, the Shyamalan of 2004-2005 does not come off well in the book. His ego appears to be off-the-scale titanic. Buoyed by all of his success, Shyamalan wants to see himself as film’s answer to Michael Jordan, the guy you throw the ball to when you’re a point down with seven seconds on the clock. He wants to be seen as exactly that dominant, that clutch. He is (not unreasonably) controlling of who gets to read the screenplay for Lady in the Water, but he decides who reads it and when. His assistant is shocked and upset when the three most important people at Disney aren’t kowtowing to him. He is shocked and upset when Nina Jacobson, the literal head of movie production at Disney at the time, told him she didn’t understand the screenplay (I’ve seen the film and I’m still confused). He was at a meeting with her and Dick Cook (he who greenlit John Carter, and Jacobson’s boss) and the head of marketing and effectively called the three of them sell-outs. Then, even after Cook offers to fund the movie, Shyamalan tells them he won’t work with Disney any more.

It's a fascinating book. At the dinner with Disney, Shyamalan appears to be driven by an impossible ego. At other moments, he seems to be completely deluded about his own abilities and what his work offers the world. But at others, he is incredibly considerate and compassionate, as you might expect given the characters he writes. I think at heart Shyamalan is a passionate, driven film-maker who got a bit lost in his own legend in the early 2000s. I believe it stems from his relationship with his father - a demanding doctor who wanted Shyamalan to exploit his academic ability to the maximum and become a top doctor or lawyer – and his desperate need to impress his parents.

In the end, Shyamalan made four quality movies in a row, before he filmed Lady in the Water and the three stinkers that followed it. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village are all worth watching. And those are the only M. Night Shyamalan movies you ever need to watch. Just pretend he retired and ignore the crap that followed them. It’s funny – a bomb this big would normally end a director’s big-budget career, but here it didn’t. Shyamalan had plot armour, it seems.

Yeah, he could have been the next Spielberg. He still might.