There's provocative, and then there's Shortbus, which opens with a close-up of the Statue of Liberty, then introduces its characters by cross-cutting between three explicit scenes of acrobatic, unsimulated sex acts, culminating in a generous display of onscreen ejaculation. Liberty, indeed. Hedwig and the Angry Inch auteur John Cameron Mitchell set out to make the most candidly sexual American film of all time (IMDb reveals that Shortbus' working title was "The Sex Film Project") and, to that end, he succeeds unequivocally. But what starts as an admirably frank satire of American sexual mores and urban hipsterism quickly sours into a meandering meditation on "owning your feelings."
For an ultraliberal cri de coeur, Shortbus sports a tried-and-trite narrative arc, following an uptight sex therapist's (Sook-Yin Lee) quest for her first orgasm. A patient leads her to the titular location, an underground salon hosting (presumably) disease-free orgies for the MacBook-and-Polaroid set, and soul-searching ensues.
The most glaring flaw of Mitchell's project reveals itself once his characters quit fucking and start talking. He workshopped and shot the film with a cast of unknowns — granted, one can hardly expect Ryan Gosling and Naomi Watts to sign on for a highbrow porn flick, though it might be hot — and their performances run the gamut from barely-there to way-too-there.
It's hard to fault Mitchell's spirit of sexual independence (after all, this is hooksexup.com), but his whip of transgression often smacks too bluntly. In one scene, a character actually sings the national anthem into another man's ass. What Shortbus ultimately lacks is a Hedwig, a charming ringleader who galvanizes skeptics and adeptly spins sentiment into spectacle. The film is a muddled platform in search of a candidate. — Akiva Gottlieb
What the hell is everyone smoking? Reading the poisonous advance news on M. Night Shyamalan's latest, you'd think the director was offering up a badly shot home video of himself sitting on the can reading aloud the phone book from cover to cover. Amid all the nonsense in the press about M. Night's ego, M. Night's crazy movie, M. Night's tell-all book, M. Night's split with Disney, M. Night's impending career meltdown and whatnot, there's one simple, important fact being conveniently ignored: Paul Giamatti has just given the greatest performance of his career — as a lead in a Hollywood studio movie no less — and no one is noticing.
Lady in the Water is, first and foremost, not the disaster everyone has predicted. It's a perfectly fine film — an effectively made, often very funny, mood piece-cum-fairy tale where thriller elements come into sharp relief every once in a while and then fade back into the background. The story concerns stuttering building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) who discovers a water nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) living in the pool of his drab but colorfully populated apartment complex. It turns out this creature is a mystical being that has to deliver a message to a writer (played, probably to his everlasting regret, by Shyamalan himself) and then return home. But preventing her from returning is a mysterious wolf-like creature that lives in the lawn around the pool. In order to figure out what to do with his unexpected guest, Cleveland has to learn the specifics of the fairy tale he is living in, find some way to apply that fairy tale to the mundane reality of his apartment complex, and get all the neighbors to assume their designated roles in the story.
It's actually a pretty cute little conceit. It's also a flighty, fragile one — alternately ridiculous, comic, sad, ridiculous, creepy, and also, well, ridiculous. No living actor should be able to pull off this story's odd dance between mundane pathos, mythic fantasy, and creeping dread. Except that Giamatti does — he's a child when he has to be, a sad and lonely little man when he has to be, and a hero when he has to be. He holds this crazy stunt of a movie together, bringing to it depths of emotion even Shyamalan probably didn't anticipate.
To be fair, Lady in the Water does have its problems. By casting himself in a pivotal role as the writer, Shyamalan appears to have distracted attention from the fact that his real surrogate in this film is Giamatti's character — the poor, flustered workaholic who has to get everyone to play their parts and somehow make magic happen. It also doesn't help that Shyamalan is a merely serviceable actor lost in a sea of talent. Jeffrey Wright deserves special mention as a crossword fiend, as does Bob Balaban as a hilariously stuffy film critic (another Night-ism blown way out of proportion by the cognoscenti) whose recitation of classic structural tropes seems to be, in part, an admission by the writer-director that he knows there's a more conventional way to tell this story. And the elaborate fairy tale Cleveland is unraveling probably has a couple of beats too many, though its baroque intricacy is part of the joke. But all in all, Lady in the Water shows Shyamalan effectively breaking out of the thriller genre — one that, at least for this critic, wasn't all that thrilling in the first place — and sending things in an altogether more risky, fascinating, and powerful direction. It helps that he has the greatest actor of his generation along for company. — Bilge Ebiri click to close