Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

By the time you read this, you will have read Harry's glowing account of Lady in the Water and Moriarty's "Story is looking for a writer" grad student thesis (I'd actually re-title it "Review is looking for an ending").

You'll have seen the frustration in some Talkbackers' words wondering why nobody can just plainly say whether the film is any good or not. And while I appreciate this need, I'm afraid I'm not going to make things any easier on you folks.

At times I felt like this might be the first film I've seen in all the years writing for AICN that I ultimately didn't like but might still say you should see just for the experience. Other times...well...other times I felt differently, probably much closer to what Moriarty felt about the film than Harry. And it was during one of these times that I wrote what follows...

It's now been nearly two weeks since I watched writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, and I'm no closer to knowing exactly how I feel about it. I take breaks from thinking about it, but my mind keeps drifting back to this sometimes baffling but always fascinating work from a man whose films I essentially worship and thrill in dissecting without fail.

It's not that I was confused by any aspect of the movie; it all made sense to me. It's not that I've forgotten what it's like to daydream or believe in fairies, or that I'm too old to "get it" (as that bastard Harry Knowles claims).

What puzzles me, however, is what Shyamalan is trying to do here. The man has dazzled me by reinventing the ghost story (The Sixth Sense), superhero mythology (Unbreakable), alien invasion stories (Signs), and historical dramas (The Village). Sometimes he surprises me, but the man never fails to key into my emotional core. These are the subjects I was fascinated by as a younger man. And without realizing it until Shyamalan started making films, I was desperate for someone to recapture my enthusiasm for these things.

Maybe my problems with Lady in the Water stem from the fact that I don't have any clear memories of my parents reading me bedtime stories as a child, or more to the point, they never made up bedtime stories. The film feels like a parent telling a child a bedtime story over the course of several days or weeks, making up new plots and characters on a daily basis, and sometimes changing the rules because the story demands it and not for any logical reasons.

As a result, Lady in the Water feels like it rambles, going off on tangents that never amount to anything, and eventually spinning out of the control until it ends abruptly and coldly. There are so many things to love about this movie, but those elements get bogged down in Shyamalan's fascination with his own narrative devices.

I'd hoped he would explore the darker corners of fairy tales. In this case, the plot focuses on a lonely and very sad man named Cleveland Heep (a moving performance by Paul Giamatti). Paul is an educated man, who abandoned his life after his wife and son were killed to become a maintenance man at an apartment complex called the Cove.

When the film begins, he is showing the building's newest tenant (a film critic played by Bob Balaban) to his room, meeting many of the Cove's residences along the way. Cleveland has a mild stutterand he writes his sad thoughts in a journal that we assume no one else will ever read.

The craziness begins when Cleveland catches a pale young woman swimming in the Cove's swimming pool. She seems slightly hurt, and Cleveland brings her into his solitary apartment to nurse her back to health. It turns out that this girl's name is Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), and she is a Narf (not a mermaid, by the way, for those who thought Night doing a remake of Splash). She's something like a nymph, who comes from the "blue world."

An unnecessary opening sequence lays out the mythology concerning Narfs and the eagles that bring them to and from our world, and the evil creatures that hunt them. Lady in the Water is the type of film where the fantastical is questioned only briefly, not because Shyamalan is trying to keep things moving, but because characters in fairly tales rarely challenge such things. And the only proof Cleveland needs that Story is something remarkable is that his stutter disappears when she's near him.

For a time, I believed Shyamalan was using the fairy tale as a veiled excuse to introduce us to some truly fascinating characters: the men and women of the Cove. Jeffrey Wright plays a man who is obsessed with crossword puzzles and lives with his young son who sees patterns and images on the backs of cereal boxes. There is the group of stoners (led by Jared Harris) who sit around an apartment all day talking and theorizing about things that mean nothing. Sketches of characters (played by the likes of Mary Beth Hurt, Freddy Rodriguez, Bill Irwin, and Sarita Choudhury) float in and out of Cleveland's life in his attempts to discover what Story's purpose in the world is and how to get her back to the blue world.

Many of the rules of the Narf world are given to us through an old Korean woman whose daughter translates for Cleveland her memories of bedtime stories from her childhood. These sections of the film feel forced and lazy.

Put simply, there is entirely too much exposition between the Korean woman and Cleveland, and just when we think we've got the Narf story straight, she remembers something else about the legends and passes on more information to Cleveland at the exact time he happens to need that particular nugget of knowledge. During these scenes, my eyes started to glaze over, especially in the scene in which Giamatti is forced to act like a little boy to put the old broad at ease.

Shyamalan's fatal plot flaw is not giving us enough of Story. She often sits quietly huddled somewhere while the humans buzz around her attempting to extract the tiniest bit of information from her. She is able to see into their futures, which is a terrifying concept but one that is only briefly explored. And then there are the scary dog-like creatures that roam the grounds blending in with the grass around the pool, waiting for a moment to strike and kill the Narf. These bad boys are genuinely scary, and they give us a window into the M. Night we are more familiar with.

Using what they know about the creatures of the blue world, the tenants discover that some among them are necessary to perform certain tasks in order to get the poor Narf girl back home. Using the advice of the film critic (who is, of course, well versed in plot devices), Cleveland gathers his fellowship and attempts to prepare everything required to get Story her ail-mail pick up from an eagle.

The turn the plot takes from this point on is curious but hardly the stuff wonderment is built on. There is no surprise ending, and that's okay; I think that device is well past its welcome in Shyamalan. But what he gives us instead is so ordinary and colorless that I couldn't help but be more than a little disappointed.

And let's talk about the Narf's name for a second: Story. Subtle, right? Shyamalan is driving home the point that this film is about act and art of weaving tales. He's doing it and so are several of the characters in the film. It's as if Night is telling us that people have lost the gift of oral gab, and this film is an attempt to restore interest in the practice. Every chance he gets, Shyamalan adds layers and facts to his original premise for Lady in the Water, but instead of felling like a flower blooming, the story feels like a weighty brick wall, slapped together without nearly the craftsmanship to let it stand on its own.

I'm assuming that most people will feel compelled to withhold judgment on Lady in the Water until the very end of the film, as it should be. But gut tells me that most will abandon interest in it much earlier. Some will jump ship the minute they realize that Shyamalan does something in this film he's never done before: he casts himself in a lead role.

Those of us who pay attention, know that Night has always had cameos in his film, but here, he takes on the part of a would-be writer who ends up being arguably the most important person in the movie. I'm not knocking the guy's performance in any way; he's actually pretty damn good in the role.

But when you find out (through Story) what his character's role in the future is destined to be, you will probably laugh. If you don't know what Shyamalan looks like, this more than likely won't bother you in the slightest, but it was a major distraction for me in a film that already had too many distractions.

There's a small part of me that wanted to be the guy who championed this film against an onslaught of naysayers claiming Shyamalan has lost his mind and/or his talent. While I certainly don't believe either of those is true, Lady in the Water is a film that is as thematically splintered as it is visually radiant.

This movie tore my brain apart trying to understand what this gifted writer-director was going for. And sitting here now, I think I know what he was going for; I'm just not sure I cared. And when you stop caring about the characters AND the story/Story, well, that's the deathblow of any film.

So, now we know M. Night Shyamalan is not perfect. I have no doubt he'll continue to make exceptional films, but Lady in the Water is not one of them.

Capone