To Act Like Children, You've Got To Think Like Children: A Few Thoughts On Lady In The Water

One very important mind blowing pattern in this movie is it looks like a moving photograph. If you know who Gregory Crewdson is, you'll notice that "Lady" looks like hundreds of his photo's on a two hour slide show. It's fantastic!

For almost a year now I've anticipated the 21st of July. The night for Shaymalan's "Lady" to arrive on the big screen, and my expectations have been high. The characters are very basic, almost "cliched" a bit, but if you understand the reason for this, you'll realize it works, very well.

This story, as everyone knows, is a bedtime story he's told his children, and the movie is marketed as a bedtime story. What happens in a bedtime story? They start out with "Once upon a time..." And you go from there. I remember when I was a young lad, my dad would tell us many stories, and there was only one rule, you have to make it up as you went along. So he would start telling a paragraphs worth then hand it over to my brother, then he to my sister and so on. We did this until my entire family had told a part of the story, and when it ended, it was like nothing we had heard of before. It was an adventure.

This is what he does with "Lady". Characters, places, things, made up creatures continue to appear and disappear through-out the story. It's written in the same style. If you tell kids stories, you have to make them basic enough for their ears to understand and for their minds to pay attention. That is why he used such basic characters in this story.

A few things really stood out. The most important line in this movie is when a man towards the end takes a stand and says, "I want to think like a child", he's talking about grown ups not having faith and understand things. I wont spoil much, but in this movie, it shows us the importance of thinking like a child. Look for three critical scenes involving children and or child like manners. This is the key to the story. In order to understand this story, you have to be a child again. Adults will simply not understand this film and will regard it as an ego trip that Night is going on. It's saying that we are to serious and in order to change, we must have faith like a child. Faith that can move mountains and believe in yourself.

Adults worry too much. I worry too much. I suck profoundly! Have you thought what a child worries about? Does he worry about college, work, bills, food? No, he worries about how much time he has to wait before going outside with his friends. Which to adults is toilet paper. It's nothing. We get so worried about our culture and wars and plagues and missiles and environmental world ending thoughts that we are so tied up in ourselves we forget the important things. This makes me think of Josh's post on sin. Why do we fear our bodies, and our health, and our green planet? Is not God the one to fear? Yes.

And to keep this short, I want to end on, Jesus commands us to have faith like a child. That faith is so simple it's often regarded as foolishness. When the children were coming to Jesus, the disciples stepped in and rejected them. And Christ said no, to become more like me, you must first become children. Let us not forget this. Our lives are but a small part in a huge painting by God. And we focus on stupid problems like pre-engagement counseling, or short film ambitions, or job interviews. Is not our God a great God? Then why do we idolize these things. Why can't we just let go?

I'm jumping all over here, again these are my first thoughts from seeing this film only a few hours ago. See Lady In The Water. It's worth the enjoyment of the big screen. Watch it with friends and family. It's magical.

Lady is my third favorite Shaymalan film. Unbreakable and Signs are one and two.