Are you too crusty and old to enjoy a good bedtime story? If so, you may find yourself numbered among a throng of stodgy critics bent on belittling Lady in the Water, M. Night Shayamalan’s newest cinematic offering. Lady in the Water is a fairy tale, and therein lies the struggle with many of its’ critics. As with any fairy tale, the magic of Lady in the Water can only be unlocked with a secret key. A key that many adults do not possess. Not surprisingly, most believe that key is simply understanding the story as a fairy tale, grasping the genre as it were, but that is never enough. The real secret to fairy tales is not knowing about them, but enjoying them. So then, the “key’ question in deciding whether to see Lady in the Water is, “Do you want to hear a bedtime story?”

Lady in the Water is a fairy tale through and through. As such it wastes little time wrestling with long journeys of concrete realism so that it can more effectively speak to “soulish realities” that the concrete world cannot embrace. Don’t expect these characters, all brightly written and brilliantly grounded, to waste half the film wading through angst-ridden cynicism over how the fantastical events happening around them could possibly be real. They are believers from the first moment. They believe in the story, just not in themselves. So as in all fairy tales, the true conflict in Lady in the Water is the human heart wrestling to believe in a higher plane, a bigger plan, and in one’s own value and purpose in the world. Fairy tales set the mood, lay down the rules, and launch themselves quickly at the heart of human experience through the most imaginative metaphors possible. Lady in the Water follows suit brilliantly and unapologetically.

What challenges the viewer even more is the way Shayamalan juxtaposes extreme fantasy (water nymphs, wolves made of roots and grass) and bizarre characterizations (a man who bodybuilds only the right half of his body?) with an almost documentary style realism. Shayamalan’s fantasy isn’t set against an idealized suburbia nor an overly harsh urban corridor. Instead it all happens around the barren concrete pool in the circa 1960’s style apartment building that’s right around the corner from all of us.

Paul Giamatti’s everyman performance is the cornerstone of that realism. I love this guy and suspect that he will eventually be considered one of the brightest talents of our time. Bryce Dallas Howard is both beautiful and magnetic. Say what you will about her performance here versus that in The Village, but just you try holding the screen with only a handful of lines and several silent close ups of your face and eyes. Finally, the ensemble of character players in Lady are ultimately what makes it all work for me. Where is this apartment complex? I want to live there. Whether Shayamalan was self-serving by casting himself into a larger role is a question I don’t even find relevant. He either pulls off the part or not, and he does. It’s funny to me that Hollywood is far more gracious with actors who decide to direct than with directors who decide to act.

Lady in the Water earns my respect if for no other reason than as a movie that’s trying to say something. Whatever your opinion of its’ artistic merits, Shayamalan continues to ask questions that deserve to be answered. As the story itself would say, the Lady in the Water awakens something in us, something powerful and true, and so I’ll ask again, “Do you want to hear a bedtime story?”