Mark Reviews Movies: THE WATER MAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 6, 2021

Children understand concepts like illness and death, but they also believe in miracles and/or magic. Some adults do, too, but experience allays those beliefs—or robs them from us—as we grow up. The story of The Water Man exists in that dichotomy, between knowing about the reality of the world and hoping for something otherworldly to save us from the harsh truth.

Our young hero's mother is terminally ill. Medicine can't save her. It can only alleviate the pain. The doctors and caregivers aren't trying to help her, only make her more comfortable. The boy's father isn't doing what the boy thinks he should do, so maybe it's the son who's destined to save his mother.

There's a lot of unspoken pain in this movie, written by Emma Needell and helmed by co-star David Oyelowo, in his feature directorial debut. There are some words a child won't say about a loved one's illness and imminent death, lest those words come true, and there are similar words that adults won't speak about such matters, hoping to delay the pain for as long as possible. In that voiceless gap exist hopes and fantasies about miracle cures or, in the case of this particular tale, a magical man, who has lived in the woods for decades because he found the key to immortality.

The movie plays as an old-fashioned adventure tale about legends and myth, magical creatures and supernatural presences, and hunts for some mysterious place in the forest using only an old map as a guide. It's a distraction for Gunner (Lonnie Chavis), the boy who's watching as his mother slowly wastes away from leukemia, but these adventures are also a bit too much of distraction for the movie itself, which approaches and touches upon hard truths but seems a bit too hesitant to confront them directly.

Gunner is an aspiring artist and writer of graphic novels. His mother Mary (Rosario Dawson) encourages him, but his Navy veteran father Amos (Oyelowo) doesn't understand his son's passion. Mary is currently at home, spending more time in bed as all of the attempts to stop her illness have failed, and Amos is busy with work and tending to his wife. Gunner doesn't quite figure into the father's plans and concerns at the moment.

All of this is set up with some honesty by Needell and Oyelowo, whose performance as the preoccupied Amos feel especially authentic within the dynamic of this family. He goes about working, hiring caretakers to watch over Mary. Gunner's research turns from a ghost story he's writing to studies about leukemia. No one says it, but when the boy finds a prescription for morphine and none of the nurses take the kid's advice about different medication, Gunner figures out that it's going to take some kind of miracle if his mother is going to love.

The family is relatively new to this small town, and Gunner starts hearing rumors of a strange, mysterious figure in the nearby woods, whom the locals call "the Water Man." A slightly older girl named Jo (Amiah Miller) tells stories about coming face-to-face with the Water Man, and she has the scar to prove it. A long-timer in the town named Jim (Alfred Molina) fills in the rest of the legend. The Water Man is a miner from long ago, who drowned in a flood and was resurrected by a magical rock. He now spends his days searching for the remains of his dead wife, hoping to resurrect her.

It's at this point, as Gunner enlists Jo to help him search the woods for the Water Man, that the story dives into its adventure, its myth, and its other distractions from the cold, sad truth of this tale. The two kids wander through the forest, looking for a cabin somewhere deep in the wooded area, and they encounter various, strange sights. Snow falls in the middle of July. The howls in the night are, according to Jo, actually mythical horses, which stampede at them later. The kids sleep under a tree, covered in beetles that almost seem to carry them down a hill, and there's an almost inevitable scene in which the two have to traverse an unstable bridge across the rapids of a river.

Gunner and Jo, of course, don't talk about their respective reasons for being in the forest, because to address such reality would ruin the movie's illusion of adventure. We know Gunner's reason, obviously, and Jo hints at it—a troubled family life, from which she's escaping, and that long scar. Meanwhile, Amos is so busy searching for Gunner, following his trail, that even the harsh reality of Mary's illness at home becomes a footnote in the narrative.

There is a certain degree of honesty to the way these characters and the movie itself evade the topic of dying and death, but Needell's screenplay takes that truth a few steps too far. The Water Man is a story of hopeful, youthful adventure, first and foremost, and while Oyelowo admirably embraces that tone and approach, it simply doesn't feel as if it's doing justice to these characters, their situation, and the difficult truths behind them.

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