Lady in the Water (2006)

Few moviegoers had heard of M. Night Shyamalan in 1999 when The Sixth Sense debuted, a blast of shivery-good cinematic entertainment that dispelled the torpor of the bug-bitten summertime release schedule with its chilled ghost-story foundation and warm psychological decor. But the banality of famelessness ceased to be the filmmaker's problem the minute young Haley Joel Osment began seeing dead people: Suddenly the storyteller was the story, and a corker of a Hollywood success saga at that. A twentysomething writer-director (as well as producer-actor and, these days, father-American Express Card pitchman), Shyamalan instantly established a name for himself as a self-confident filmmaker of high compositional standards, an intriguing young fogy committed to an ancient and ostensibly disappearing old-fogy tradition of ripping yarns. More important, Sixth Sense was a hit, a crowd-pleaser: This starry Night showed himself to be an aesthetic perfectionist with a golden commercial touch.

With Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002), and The Village (2004), Shyamalan continued to plow his field of dreams, a place where specially gifted Shyamalan kind of men (Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix) sort out the real, true, and important from the hoo-ha everyone else is feeding them — especially since the real, true, and important is often of a spiritual and/or supernatural nature. To mash myths only slightly, a Shyamalan man is a wizard trapped in a world of Muggles. As, it seems, the filmmaker himself has come to believe is his fate.

Muggledom runs amok in Lady in the Water, Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date. His most fanciful, too, since the narrative springs from a fairy tale the director made up for his two daughters: A nymphlike creature named Story (The Village's Bryce Dallas Howard, her waifishness perhaps borrowed from old photos of Mia Farrow in bangs), who's actually a magical narf from the Blue World, gets stranded among the non-narf residents of a depressed, earthbound apartment complex suitable for recycling in a droll Jim Jarmusch pastiche. The place is haphazardly managed by a stuttering drabster named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), and clearly something about the name heeped on his character (in a movie riddled with eccentric monikers) has undone Giamatti, who doesn't stand a chance at making the guy relatable, even as a schlub.

Story needs to get back to where she once belonged, but she's thwarted by an unpleasant, wiry, drooling creature called a scrunt, and it's up to Cleveland to rally the rest of the circus-tent tenants (among them Cindy Cheung as a hard-edged, go-getter Korean college student, Jeffrey Wright as a quiet crossword-puzzle fanatic, Bill Irwin as a dour, housebound TV watcher, and Shyamalan as a sensitive writer whose work, Story prophesies, will profoundly affect future generations) to help Dorothy get back to Kansas. I mean to help E.T. get back to the spaceship. I mean to help Story get back to the Blue World, and in so doing, discover the bit of spiritual blue that exists within each of us if only we believe in Tinker Bell, ecology, Jungian archetypes, and the possibility of being touched by an angel.

Except, of course, for the one who is untouchable. It is the movie's proudest and biggest fart joke that the building's newest resident is a ''books and movie critic'' named Mr. Farber, a pinched sourball played by Bob Balaban with the same impressive enemy-of-creativity dyspepsia he brought to the role of network executive on Seinfeld. Nothing charms, impresses, delights, amuses, or moves Mr. Farber (the name echoes that of the great critic Manny Farber — and, for that matter, movie journalist Stephen Farber).He doesn't believe in narfs, movie magic, or communal tenant activity. And in the end, it gives away nothing to reveal that the killjoy is dispatched by the scrunt with nary a grunt.

But while the subplot is an up-yours to actual critics and a wink-wink to civilians (who are likely to be busy enough keeping up with the nomenclature), the rise and fall of Mr. Farber results in something far punier: The amount of story time devoted to such an inconsequential naysayer emphasizes the movie's very smallness, its unease as a cohesive piece, and the inner creative discontent at its core. Why a filmmaker so gifted with talent as well as so fortunate in his success should scrunt and scratch his private itches in public — in front of the very audience that has lauded him — is a mystery too deep for this Muggle. Was the reception of his last film not quite as Blue Worldly as he wished it to be? I guess it takes a Village to raise a narf.

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