Manoj Nelliattu (Night) Shyamalan’s Leap of Faith
The other day I watched the movie Lady in the Water. Yes, it came out last year—I don’t rush to see things just so I can say I saw it first—I’m too distracted by so many books to read, and stories to write, and art I need to make, and conversations I need to have—movie watching happens in between times. When it's raining or snowing and I want to stay in. When I have a cold, or need cheering up, things like that.
Lady was panned by the critics; but that’s not surprising—in the film a character is a film critic, a beady-eyed, pompous little bore of a man who gets eaten by a monster. I’m not really all that interested in what critics have to say—aside from one or two, I really don’t care to know the opinion of most people who bloviate* for dollar bills. But then again, I liked Snakes on a Plane. I know schadenfreude is not a good thing, but I have to say it was kind of fun watching all those CGI snakes losing their reptilian minds, while Samuel L. Jackson almost singlehandedly saved the day. It was not boring and the bad guys got caught in the end. I’m a stickler for that. I hate movies where the bad guys get away with their bad behavior, because it happens way too much in the real world. It should almost never happen in the land of make believe. Okay, well maybe Hannibal Lecter can get away with things, but that’s it.
My friends gave up on M. Night after The Sixth Sense. They thought he jumped the shark on his next film Unbreakable, because it wasn’t anywhere nearly as good as The Sixth Sense. And those who saw Signs would go cross-eyed and hiss if I just mentioned it. Forget The Village. I don't think anybody I know saw Lady in the Water.
I saw all of those movies. I cried at points in each one of them, but none moved me as much as Lady in the Water. A man named Cleveland Heep (played by Paul Giamatti), who used to be a doctor, is now the manager of an apartment building near Philadelphia. He has suffered the tragedy of his wife and child being murdered. His grief has been kept buried; he only allows it out in his diary. He is now pressed to help a fairytale creature, a sea nymph, (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), who has shown up in the building swimming pool. Her mission was to find the one person she was sent to fill with enlightenment, and then go back home to her underwater world. But a nasty creature—one with seemingly no other purpose, and no reason for doing so—is trying to kill her and prevent this.
You can say what you want about M. Night’s films—that the plot twists can be transparent; that the stories can be really dopey (The Village couldn’t have been ruined more completely by its sillier than silly explanation for supposedly supernatural creatures); that the scripts should be written by others and he should stick to directing. But whatever you say, you can’t say they don’t have a heart and a soul. The man always manages to find the beauty and humanity of us, we of the partially evolved consciousness. His stories are morality tales cloaked in fairytales (and what fairytale is not, in the end, a morality tale?). He asks us to take a leap of faith and believe in his stories and along the way maybe even reset our moral compasses. His films are about faith in higher powers as much as they are about faith in the God who dwells in all of us. This man is a Hindu (who went to Catholic school, and this, too, informs him). Hinduism teaches the phrase namaste: Loosely translated it means “the divine in me, honors the divine in you.” There is a moment in Lady when Cleveland Heep looks at the photo of his wife and child and says “I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. Oh, I should have been there, I am always going to regret... just not being there. I miss your faces. They remind me of God.”
In those moments in his film—and the curious among you will have to rent the movies and see for yourself when those moments are—it is breathtaking, and it leaves me, at least, with a belief in the ability of human beings to be better and better. I think any undertaking such as this is worth my full attention.
Namaste.
*A big thank you to my good friend Trey Casimir at Pennsylvania Blind Chicken for reintroducing me to that great word
Lady was panned by the critics; but that’s not surprising—in the film a character is a film critic, a beady-eyed, pompous little bore of a man who gets eaten by a monster. I’m not really all that interested in what critics have to say—aside from one or two, I really don’t care to know the opinion of most people who bloviate* for dollar bills. But then again, I liked Snakes on a Plane. I know schadenfreude is not a good thing, but I have to say it was kind of fun watching all those CGI snakes losing their reptilian minds, while Samuel L. Jackson almost singlehandedly saved the day. It was not boring and the bad guys got caught in the end. I’m a stickler for that. I hate movies where the bad guys get away with their bad behavior, because it happens way too much in the real world. It should almost never happen in the land of make believe. Okay, well maybe Hannibal Lecter can get away with things, but that’s it.
My friends gave up on M. Night after The Sixth Sense. They thought he jumped the shark on his next film Unbreakable, because it wasn’t anywhere nearly as good as The Sixth Sense. And those who saw Signs would go cross-eyed and hiss if I just mentioned it. Forget The Village. I don't think anybody I know saw Lady in the Water.
I saw all of those movies. I cried at points in each one of them, but none moved me as much as Lady in the Water. A man named Cleveland Heep (played by Paul Giamatti), who used to be a doctor, is now the manager of an apartment building near Philadelphia. He has suffered the tragedy of his wife and child being murdered. His grief has been kept buried; he only allows it out in his diary. He is now pressed to help a fairytale creature, a sea nymph, (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), who has shown up in the building swimming pool. Her mission was to find the one person she was sent to fill with enlightenment, and then go back home to her underwater world. But a nasty creature—one with seemingly no other purpose, and no reason for doing so—is trying to kill her and prevent this.
You can say what you want about M. Night’s films—that the plot twists can be transparent; that the stories can be really dopey (The Village couldn’t have been ruined more completely by its sillier than silly explanation for supposedly supernatural creatures); that the scripts should be written by others and he should stick to directing. But whatever you say, you can’t say they don’t have a heart and a soul. The man always manages to find the beauty and humanity of us, we of the partially evolved consciousness. His stories are morality tales cloaked in fairytales (and what fairytale is not, in the end, a morality tale?). He asks us to take a leap of faith and believe in his stories and along the way maybe even reset our moral compasses. His films are about faith in higher powers as much as they are about faith in the God who dwells in all of us. This man is a Hindu (who went to Catholic school, and this, too, informs him). Hinduism teaches the phrase namaste: Loosely translated it means “the divine in me, honors the divine in you.” There is a moment in Lady when Cleveland Heep looks at the photo of his wife and child and says “I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. Oh, I should have been there, I am always going to regret... just not being there. I miss your faces. They remind me of God.”
In those moments in his film—and the curious among you will have to rent the movies and see for yourself when those moments are—it is breathtaking, and it leaves me, at least, with a belief in the ability of human beings to be better and better. I think any undertaking such as this is worth my full attention.
Namaste.
*A big thank you to my good friend Trey Casimir at Pennsylvania Blind Chicken for reintroducing me to that great word
