Lady in the Water (2006)

Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep rescues what he thinks is a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

Director:

M. Night Shyamalan

Writer:

M. Night Shyamalan

Stars:

Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeffrey Wright

2 wins & 4 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Paul Giamatti	...	Cleveland Heep
Bryce Dallas Howard	...	Story
Jeffrey Wright	...	Mr. Dury
Bob Balaban	...	Harry Farber
Sarita Choudhury	...	Anna Ran
Cindy Cheung	...	Young-Soon Choi
M. Night Shyamalan	...	Vick Ran
Freddy Rodríguez	...	Reggie
Bill Irwin	...	Mr. Leeds
Mary Beth Hurt	...	Mrs. Bell
Noah Gray-Cabey	...	Joey Dury
Joseph D. Reitman	...	Long Haired Smoker
Jared Harris	...	Goatee Smoker
Grant Monohon	...	Emaciated Smoker
John Boyd	...	One-Eyebrow Smoker

Storyline

Cleveland Heep, a stuttering apartment superintendent, encounters a girl named Story swimming in the complex's pool. He soon learns that she comes from the Blue World, and has a message for mankind. Will he be able to help her complete her mission?

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Plot Keywords:

bedtime story | apartment | swimming pool | stuttering | eagle | 

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Taglines:

Time is running out for a happy ending.

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Genres:

Fantasy | Mystery | Thriller

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Certificate:

PG

Details

Official Sites:

Warner Bros [France] Warner Bros. [Spain]

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

21 July 2006 (USA)

Also Known As:

La dame de l'eau

Filming Locations:

Levittown, Pennsylvania, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$75,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

$435,539 (Australia) (8 September 2006)

Gross:

$172,454 (Chile) (29 September 2006)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Warner Bros., Blinding Edge Pictures, Legendary Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

110 min

Sound Mix:

SDDS Dolby Digital EX DTS-ES

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

According to the book The Man Who Heard Voices, or How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, one of the reasons why Shyamalan decided to part with Disney was because the Disney president of development Nina Jacobsen took her son to a party instead of staying home to read the script for Lady in the Water (2006). Shyamalan had it personally couriered to her, and to add insult to injury, she didn't like it anyway. Shyamalan went off in a huff, and the "creative differences" he purportedly had with Disney was that he simply felt there was nothing creative about Disney anymore. He took the script to Warner Bros instead, but without the usual marketing campaign that Disney promoted his other films with, Lady in the Water (2006) was a box-office flop.

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Goofs

In the bathroom scene where Cleveland Heep is speaking with Story, you can see a towel rack directly behind him with two towels hanging on it. They are both draped on it with the same length of towel showing. In the subsequent scene when they pan back to Cleveland, the towel on the right is clearly shorter than the towel placed on the towel rack on the left.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Cleveland Heep: Once, man and those in the water were linked. They inspired us. They spoke of the future. Man listened and it became real. But man does not listen very well. Man's need to own everything led him deeper into land. The magic world of the ones that lived in the ocean... and the world of men... separated. Through the centuries, their world and all the inhabitants of it... stopped trying. The world of man became more violent. War upon war played out, as there were no guides to listen to...

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Crazy Credits

Childlike illustrations appear over and under some of the end credits.

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Connections

Referenced in The Nostalgia Critic: Signs (2012)

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Soundtracks

Soul Love
Written by David Bowie
Performed by David Bowie
Courtesy of RZO Music

User Reviews

A story about Stories.

The lest said about the plot of the film the better. Not because it's bad because it's an imaginative one, and you should really go in having no idea what you're in store for. That's part of the point of the movie.

The introduction of this movie is done in cave drawings. It's a fitting opening and a good clue that this movie is about stories. No, not modern film, which many critics and audiences today think is about pushing boundaries and constantly doing something 'new'. This movie is about the good old fashioned story. The reason why our ancient ancestors sat around fires and told them, and their ability to inspire and save souls.

There isn't anything truly new about it (it has roots in the classic fairy tales and epic poems of antiquity), other than the fact that it dares to be a great film made in the mondern era in spite of being littered with elements of the now despised classical story (which apparently isn't good enough for modern film makers anymore).

The thing about these classic stories and the one that Shaymalan is attempting to tell is that they have a purpose, and strive to inspire society and humanity as a whole. They lead people to do great things, and make us all feel better in the end, where most modern 'stories' feel more like egotistical attempts of "artists" to make themselves feel great and leave us in awe of their great greatness.

Christopher Doyle lends some excellent shots to this film, which some how manage to make a scene of an every day loser frigthenedly warding off a were-wolf type monster with a pool skimmer seem exceptionally epic. At the same time it helps the story (for me at least) pull those same strings that great stories like Gilgamesh, and the Aeneid pull.

I saw this film the day it opened and I was delighted. I came home, as is my habit, and read all the reviews. A good section of this movie is directed at attacking assanine, jaded, film critics who think their opinions are authoratitive (it depicts them as being the ruiners of the classic story), and so, all of the assanine, jaded, and authoratative film critics seem to have panned it.

No one seemed really sure what the movie was about, but were all quick to pan M. Night as being arrogant for casting himself in the role of a writer destined to change the world. They, ironically, claim that he was being arrogant, completing unable to fathom that their own presumptions about why he cast himself in that role could in fact be a good deal more arrogant...

I'll have to admit that I've been the jaded film critic before, but one I came out of this one I remembered why I've always loved stories, and why they don't' always have to be new and fit into some silly sense of "reality".