Great Expectations

Barely 12 hours after Clerks II, I was back at the movie theater again, this time for the film I was most looking forward to this weekend, Lady in the Water.

I'm a huge M. Night Shyamalan fan. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are both in my top 10 movie list. Signs is in the top 40.

Then there was The Village. There's no way around it -- I was really disappointed when I saw it in the theater. But later I watched it a second time on DVD, and my appreciation for it really increased. (Not into top 100 territory, but it still greatly increased.) I realized on the second viewing that my reaction to it the first time was a problem of bad expectations.

Movies by "Night" have always had strange trailers. One of the best things about the trailers for The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable was how they gave little away of even the premise of the movie, while still tantalizing you. But The Village had a bad trailer. It set you up for one seriously scary movie about monsters in the woods, a film scarier than any of his three previous hits. Instead, The Village was essentially a romance movie. Upon a second viewing, I came to decide it was a pretty good one. But still, show up to the theater expecting a scary thriller and end up watching a Victorian-esque romance, and you're going to be disappointed.

So with Lady in the Water, I was trying to have appropriate expectations. The very first trailer for the film (months ago) spelled it out: this was "a bedtime story." Then came the later trailers, which (just as The Village trailers before) suddenly tried to make it out to be a scare-the-crap-out-of-you thriller. But I didn't bite. Bedtime story. Fairy tale. That's what I was mentally prepping to see.

Then the critics' reviews started coming in earlier this week. They were, to put it lightly, not kind. They weren't at all going to get me to not see the movie, but they did make me probably not only adjust my expectations, but actually lower them. I was going to see a bedtime story, not a thriller, and possibly not a very good one.

As to what expectations of quality a viewer should have going in, I can't say. But I thought this movie was great. And very much a fairy tale. If you're going expecting any other kind of movie, you're not going to like it. And I think this goes a long way toward explaining the negative reactions of a lot of critics.

"It doesn't make sense," many have said. Does it make sense that Goldilocks thinks its okay to go into a total stranger's house, eat their food, and go to sleep in their bed? Of course not, but we don't care because it's a fairy tale.

"It's not scary," others have said. Do we really fear for any of the Three Little Pigs when the Big Bad Wolf blows their house down? No. The tale is moral, not frightening.

"Is that supposed to be a surprise twist?" others have said. Here, I just shake my head at the critics, who more than anyone ought not to be expecting Shyamalan to keep jumping through the same hoops like some trained animal.

Then on top of the faulty expectations, add the fact that one of the characters in the film is a book and film critic. And he is very much the butt end of some big jokes. Not every real-life critic is so petty to become indignant at this, but I guarantee you a few simply couldn't take the joke.

Set aside all this stuff that has nothing to do with evaluating the film, in and of itself, for what it is supposed to be, and here's what you're left with: a beautiful fairy tale. There's wonder. There's deep emotion. And as with all of the director's other films, it is meticulous. Every single character, every line of dialogue they speak, every fact we learn about them, is all there for a very specific reason, that all adds up perfectly in the end.

But... I'm still topping out at an A- here. There were two small flaws in what to my mind was otherwise a pretty perfect film. One... it has some rather ham-fisted exposition delivered in rather clunky bricks at a few points in the movie. Two... it dips a few times too many into the Shyamalan well of cinematography tricks. For example, the first few times Shyamalan ran a dialogue between two characters by only showing the face of one and leaving us the back of the other's head for the entire sequence, it seemed novel. In Unbreakable in particular, it really heightened the performances in key scenes. But in Lady of the Water, it felt very much like a familiar gimmick being repeated here. And just like a copy, it lost some of the clarity of the original.

But despite these minor blemishes, I still truly loved this film. And you may too... that is, provided (and I cannot stress this enough) that you know what it is you're going to see, and treat it accordingly.