| Lady in the Water
A film with a stuttering
protagonist by M. Night Shyamalan
Reviewed by Darrell
M. Dodge, MA, CCC-SLP
This is the fifth in a
series of major films by M. Night Shyamalan that dramatize human
redemption through socialization and compassion.
Lady in the Water is actually very
different from the previous four films in that it is intended to
be a children's fairy tale accessible to adults. But the
themes common to all five films are worth reviewing:
In The Sixth Sense,
a child psychiatrist (who seems to have recovered from a bullet
wound inflicted by a former patient) and a boy who possesses the ability to perceive dead people
acting in a parallel reality assist each other in finding
redemption, connection, and peace with their loved ones. In
Unbreakable (the least familiar of
the films to me) a man who is actually a "superhero"
character finds
redemption when he learns to use his intuitive "superpowers" to
identify and vanquish evil. Signs tells the
story of a former priest who rediscovers his faith and rescues
his family when Earth is
saved from an alien invasion by the coincidence (or plan) that
the aliens are destroyed by contact with water. In The
Village, an entire village -- purposefully isolated
because of its founders' fear of the modern world -- is redeemed
and humanized by an act of courage and strength by a blind woman who
braves the unknown to get antibiotics for her dying lover.
In Lady in the Water,
a lonely apartment manager named Cleveland Heep (played by
Paul Giamatti) -- who was a doctor until his life was devastated
by the murder of his wife and children -- is redeemed through his
attempts to rescue and protect a lovely female visitor -- a
"narf" named Story -- who has been sent from a supernatural
"Blue World"
to deliver a message to humans. These attempts inspire
him to recover his true identity as a healer. In the process, Heep, who is a stutterer, is
required to communicate with
the residents of the apartment complex ("The Cove") to organize a
rescue party. Heep struggles with his dysfluent speech and must
overcome the challenges of incomplete knowledge and misleading
information about an ancient story, unhelpfully exacerbated by
an arrogant and jaded film critic who has just moved into Heep's
apartment complex.
Another barrier to the success of Heep's enterprise is the lack of self-confidence demonstrated by
key characters, including Heep himself, Story, and Vick Ran, a writer
(played by
Shyamalan.) Vick is revealed to be the "vessel" for Story's muse, who
is destined to write a book that will inspire a future U.S. president to
bring positive change to the
world. The members of Heep's rescue party work together to
overcome the false roles and discover their true identities just
in time to help supernatural beings called "Tartutics"
protect the narf from a hyena-like creature called a "scrunt" so that
she can be carried back to the Blue World by the Eatlon -- a giant
eagle. Just before she leaves, Heep and Story embrace and he thanks her for saving his life.
There is a strange element in the
resolution of the story: while Vick is clearly identified as the
writer whose works will be influential, it is Cleveland whose journals about his lost family are actually read by
Story, deeply affecting her.
Critical Reception
Lady cannot
be discussed without mentioning the wildly disparate responses
from critics who have mostly written negative reviews and many
Shyamalan fans
who are more sympathetic to his films. This controversy may have helped
damage the film's box office prospects. Some Shyamalan fans have
blamed the bad reviews on the unflattering portrayal of the film
critic, who is ultimately killed by the scrunt. This would
seem too easy, however. At least one critic (Mark Savlov of the
Austin Chronicle) enjoyed the portrayal, calling it "one
of several outlandishly fine performances in a film top-loaded
with honest-to-goodness acting, a prize in genre filmmaking
that's roughly as rare as peace in our time" (while nonetheless
giving the film two stars out of four.)
It would also be tempting
to blame the critics' responses on Heep's relatively severe stuttering,
which some reviewers called annoying. But Giamatti's performance has been almost
uniformly cited as one of the film's strengths.
Most likely, however, these
irritants are only contributing factors to the reviewers' lack
of appreciation for the message Shyamalan is trying to convey.
This, combined with the director's perceived "failure" to produce a "genre"
horror or science fiction film with a satisfyingly chic surprise
ending like that of The Sixth Sense produced a sense that
Shyamalan "failed" to produce this time around. "Failure" is an
apparently unforgivable sin in the mass media culture these days;
particularly failure by an artist who seems aloof or
lacking an appropriate lack of humility. Hence the Shyamalan bashing and
piling on.
The Role of Stuttering in Heep's
Redemption: An Overlooked Element of Lady in the Water
The first time Cleveland
Heep stuttered severely on a /k/ sound at the first showing of Lady in
the Water I attended, a fellow just to my left let out a
simultaneous guffaw and stifled comic book "pshaw" that was
accompanied by uneasy shifting and murmuring throughout the
theatre. (People who stutter, are called upon continually to
understand the surprised reactions of
people to our seemly novel affliction.)
Despite Paul Giamatti's
sincere attempts to produce a realistic stutter, he only rarely
tripped the "stutter meter" in this reviewer's solar
plexus. He did
do a fine job of registering Heep's frustration with his speech
dysfluencies, as well as his anticipation of stuttering. His
dysfluencies also have a consistency (such as his difficulty
with voicing /b/ and the vowel after /p/) that is characteristic
of real stuttering. Many stutterers
watching the film will identify with Heep's taking on of a
daunting speech task, as he is called upon and accepts the
challenge of interviewing tenants to discover their specific
talents and organize the narf's rescue party.
That a stutterer is
"chosen" to be the story's most important communicator is
similar in some respects to the "selection" of the blind girl
Ivy to be the person who must journey through the forest to the
gravel road and the life-saving medications in The Village.
It wouldn't occur to most reviewers (or perhaps viewers for that
matter) that taking on a task like this would be an act of
courage for a stutterer. Shyamalan's selection of this
disability for his protagonist would seem to imply that he does.
Also, in a strange way, these two characters are perfect for the
challenges they are given. Because Ivy cannot see anyway,
she can travel in the dark and is not afraid of it. Cleveland's
ability to persevere in spite of his past and his frustrating
speech dysfluencies have given him a toughness and compassion
that make him a perfect healer.
Heep's stuttering
disappears when he is speaking to or is around the narf, once he
has gotten over the shock, fear, and annoyance at finding her in his pool.
Heep and Ran's sister both notice this, but Shyamalan doesn't press the point
too far. This allows the possibility that this temporary "cure" is
akin to the
situational fluency experienced by many stutterers when in the
presence of people (for example, children) with whom they feel
comfortable. Heep does stutter when he is alone, but this is not
as unusual or rare as some suppose. And his stutter is most
severe when he is speaking to the film critic.
The importance of the
portrayal of stuttering in Lady in the Water
cannot be underestimated. This is (to my knowledge) the first
American film to feature relatively severe stuttering behavior by a major
protagonist realistically and in a sympathetic
manner. Although there might be a tendency of some viewers to
look for a cause of Heep's stuttering in the previous loss of his wife and children,
(who were murdered in their
home when he was not there) there is nothing presented that
would make his stuttering anything other than developmental in
nature. No one in the film laughs at Heep's stuttering or seems
to think less of him for it. In fact, he seems to be appreciated
and respected by the tenants. At one point, Vick's sister
provides a word for Heep when he has a block, for which he
thanks her: not a good model for listeners, but a natural
response of some stutterers. "No One is Ever Told Who They Are."
A stuttering protagonist is
appropriate for a story that is in many ways about the difficulties
of effective communication. Indeed, Shyamalan forces us to learn about many aspects
of the myth that drives the story from a swivel-hipped Korean
college student's sporadic and often incoherent interviews of
her Korean-speaking mother. Knowledge of the myth is literally
assembled from half-heard bits and pieces. And at one point,
critical parts are pieced together from Story's sign
language, relayed from Vick's sister to Heep. In a similar way, members of the rescue party
are provided inaccurate roles in the story through stereotypes
and story conventions provided by the film critic and from
assumptions made by Heep. The point of the myth is that "no one is ever told who they are," the
student explains to Heep at one point. Accordingly, a man chosen
as an "interpreter" finally realizes that he has been miscast
and that his son who reads significance into cereal box artwork
is the interpreter. And Heep, who at first was mis-identified as
Story's guardian, is revealed to be her healer.
A similar lack of
knowledge is only
overcome painstakingly by humans, who may spend an entire
lifetime without finding an identity outside of conventional
role-models, and may never know what it
is even if they have found it. In Shyamalan's mythic
story, the problem is that humans don't listen to the right
voices in themselves when they seek the answer. What are humans listening to?
Every image of television that is glimpsed in this film is an
image of past and present wars. That seems a bit simplistic.
Maybe he should have thrown in some clips of "The Price is Right." |
