It's hard for me to take this film seriously because M. Night Shyamalan cast himself as a world-saving author whose works will go on to inspire great leaders in future generations. Well, that's not the only reason, but it's a good start. Shyamalan's not exactly a bad actor, but he doesn't bring anything to the role except the colossal ego behind the casting decision. You see, people of today, especially movie critics, don't understand Shyamalan's genius; only future generations will venerate him. Humbugs like movie critics are around to poke their pencils in his plot holes and make fun of him. As an answer to those nasty critics, Shyamalan provides us with Mr. Farber (Bob Balaban), a movie critic whose role in the film is to read situations wrong, give bad advice, pretend to know how the movie is going to turn out because there's no creativity in the world, and get mauled by a scrunt because he's wrong about that. Maybe I should fear scrunts in my lawn, but I don't think that's creativity, Mr. Shyamalan. It's sour grapes. (Of course, it turns out that Farber was actually correct in certain important advice he gives in the film about the identities of several important characters, and it's not his fault that the other characters misinterpret his advice, but that's another story.)

Paul Giamatti plays Cleveland Heep, the stuttering shlub superintendent of a Philadelphia apartment complex. He's lonely and sad, burdened by the kind of secrets that come out in expository dialog. He discovers a naked young woman swimming in the pool after hours, and in the morning learns that she's Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a narf—nymph-like water creatures who used to hang around giving advice to humans until humans stopped listening and made war on each other instead. She's been sent to find her vessel, a human in whom she'll awaken hidden abilities to change humanity for the better. But she'll need her guardian, who will protect her from the scrunt, a wolf-like lawn creature that wants to kill her. There are rules about where and when he can kill her, but he's a rogue scrunt who breaks the rules, because she's a madame narf, and the tartutics (evil monkeys nobody can see) are supposed to come kill him, but they haven't shown up yet. Is Heep the guardian? Who are the members of the guild? Who is the healer? What's this about seven sisters? Where was I?

Oh, right. So it's easy for a critic to make a film he or she didn't like sound stupid by relaying the plot in such a manner as I have just demonstrated. Perhaps a favorable review would make it sound magical and creative and exciting, but this is not a favorable review. I sort of halfheartedly appreciate Shyamalan's attempts to do his own thing, but I wish his own thing made sense and told interesting stories and didn't feel like needlessly protracted bouts of sham creativity. Let's start with that ancient folktale about narfs and scrunts, which is apparently Asian in origin—Giamatti goes to an elderly Korean lady for details on the legend, although I challenge you to explain how the Korean language could produce words like narf and scrunt. Shyamalan says he based the film on a bedtime story he told to his children; he expanded on it, embellished it, and added Bryce Dallas Howard as his muse. The main problem is that it feels like something an exhausted father might come up with to entertain his kids, with all the resultant contradictions that arise when you're making things up on the fly. Its main emphasis is on the rules that exist that all of the participants must obey, but then the only things resembling plot developments in the film are the times when it turns out those rules have clauses and exceptions. It doesn't feel fully thought out, and the underlying story doesn't provide any of the satisfaction that real oral history provides. It's thin stuff, stretched out to nearly two hours by Shyamalan's faith in his own abilities, but not much else.

There are good performances here, which you always find in a Shyamalan film; despite his other problems as a director, he's a good director of actors, especially in quiet moments. Giamatti leads the pack as the superintendent who desperately wants to believe there's a reason to be alive, and his scenes with Howard, especially the early ones when he's still trying to figure out who or what she is, are touching. He underplays dialog that might sound idiotic—and that does come to sound idiotic later in the film. Howard is a cipher who spends most of the film as a sort of waterlogged oracle visited by the various characters. The underrated Jeffrey Wright is a treat as a crossword-puzzle addict who finds himself the center of everyone's attention when they decide he has a major role to play.

In the end, it all feels undercooked. Shyamalan didn't work hard enough to ground his fairy tale in any sense of logic, even internal logic. The characters spend most of the film running back and forth explaining the plot to each other so the audience won't be left out of any of the intricacies Shyamalan thinks he wrote in. There aren't enough of those magical moments that he used to excel at. All of his failings as a director are on display, along with precious little of what made him such a huge commodity. And keep this in mind: Disney backed his first four hits, but they balked on this one, and Shyamalan left the studio citing creative differences. According to a book about the breakup, The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, Disney specifically objected to two of the most galling things about this film: Shyamalan's self-anointing as savior of the world and the vicious treatment of the film critic. Guess what, M. Night? You should have stuck around and learned something.

—July 23, 2006