David Oyelowo's directorial debut 'The Water Man' — about a boy looking for a local urban legend in the Pacific Northwest — is a kinder, gentler kids' adventure. Maybe too gentle, says Jessica Kiang. Our review.
Noble intentions are announced from the start, with camera moves so soft they’re practically on tiptoes introducing the splendidly named 11-year-old Gunner Boone and his beloved but clearly ailing mother Mary . Rounded out by his father Amos , who recently returned from a tour of duty in Japan, the Boone family are new arrivals in Pine Mills, a logging town in the Pacific Northwest and the kind of place where, as Amos points out, even the Chinese restaurant only plays country music.
But when the gravity of his mother’s illness can no longer be concealed from Gunner, the boy trades in his storybooks for “every book you have on leukemia.” It’s in the pages of one of these tomes that he finds strange marginalia referring to the local legend of the Water Man. This is not a reference to some potential sequel to the 1998 Adam Sandler hitbut to a much less terrifying prospect: A wild boogeyman who lives in the woods and has found the secret of immortality.
With Oyelowo’s thespian bona fides, it’s not surprising he secured such a fine cast; it is surprising, however, that he gives actors as fine as Bello and Molina so very little acting to do. Both are underused and, aside from one scene where Bello’s law-enforcement officer fixes Jo’s abusive father with a, they never have more than one note to play at any given time.
It’s progressive, in a restrained way, to make the story so little about race when Gunner’s family is black and his reluctant playmate Jo, as well as seemingly everyone else is in this town, is white.