M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense featured a nicely intense performance from a child actor, some creepy atmospherics, a neat twist that makes you want to sit up and applaud for O all of two seconds. Unbreakable I found more interesting because Shyamalan had shrugged off his mainstream appeal and started to show his true colors: a comic-book freak who takes his superheroes seriously, to the point of spending the budget of a major motion picture telling an origin story.
Shyamalan's latest-- where Mel Gibson and family find funny going-ons in the middle of their cornfield-- shows no sign whatsoever of him apologizing for his career to date. His first movie was a hit his second an interesting failure (though not to my eyes, not quite); he's on to something, he believes, and in Signs he wants to make believers of all of us.
Shyamalan can be effective. He takes a page or six from The X-Files and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- particularly the sequence where aliens intrude into Melinda Dillon's house-- and presents them to us without any apparent embarrassment (a little tarted up of course-- even in Sixth Sense he was too fond of big 'boo!' moments). He's not quite Spielberg but he's canny enough to hide shortcomings with bits of humor and clumsy characterization.
Just how odd his humor is is worth noting-- someone recognizing Joaquin Phoenix as a famous former baseball player is asked: "how come the girls don't lick your toes?" A young woman demands to confess to Gibson (it's not stated clearly but he's a lapsed Episcopalian), and they argue over whether 'douche bag' is a curse word or not (Gibson insists it is). Don't know if it's his multicultural background, but Shyamalan's dialogue tends to make you think of someone who hasn't mastered English yet, and uses this as a source of jokes.
The characterization is equally odd. Joaquin Phoenix lives with Gibson and for the longest time-- long enough for the term 'longtime companion' to pop up in my head-- I thought Gibson was finally getting over his longstanding homophobia till someone pointedly thanks Phoenix for coming to stay with his brother (not gay--check; still a real-life douche bag-- check). To his credit Gibson gives an appealingly self-effacing performance; Phoenix on the other hand has always been interesting, and doesn't disappoint. Sparks fly between Gibson and a police officer (nicely underplayed by Cherry Jones) but nothing comes out of this (Shyamalan's films are as chaste as Disney pictures). The boy (Rory Culkin) is quite good, the little girl (Abigail Breslin) quite eerie.
Appreciate the humor and odd characters, but there are times when the storytelling isn't just odd, but suffers from a serious disconnect. An intense confrontation erupts between Gibson and Culkin over dinner, and you can't help but go "huh?" There was no hint of tension till this moment; the family seemed like a big warm happy-- maybe a little sad, but nothing simmering beneath the surface. The little girl is perhaps a touch too eerie; I keep expecting her to turn out to be one of the aliens (the dog barking at her suggested as much), and felt cheated when she stayed firmly human (though still odd).
Less forgivable is the level of intelligence displayed throughout (those who haven't seen the picture may want to skip the next three paragraphs). Gibson is gifted with a huge hint from no less than the director himself (in an amusing Hitchcockian cameo) who informs Gibson that the aliens-- "seem to have a little trouble with water" (water was Bruce Willis' weakness too in Unbreakable-- does Shyamalan hold a grudge against the stuff?). Gibson calls for a vote: should they stay in the house or move near the lake? He's outvoted; more, he sticks with said vote without complaint (he doesn't even tell them "well, the man's had a run-in with one of the things, so he must know something.."). As far as house sieges go-- The Birds; Night of the Living Dead; Straw Dogs; Panic Room (Shyamalan, incidentally, quotes from each extensively)-- the siege in Signs is pathetic: soon as the aliens come knocking the humans head straight for the basement. Not even an attempt at a struggle, no hint of a strategy; one of them even forgets (you see this coming a mile away) a crucial inhaler.
If you think the defenders are silly, you should see the aliens--they avoid using large-scale weapons, we are told, because they don't want to ruin the Earth's environment. Only ground troops, and only hand-to-hand combat. Hand-to-hand! We're talking World Domination here not a Wide World of Wrestling match. Yes they have poison gas, which they use to kill "many" (we're never given figures, not even estimates), but think about it-- gas is such a clumsy weapon, imprecise in delivery and difficult to store and handle (the aliens, conveniently, fart it out of their fingernails); a simple ray gun would have made the invasion that much more credible. It would also have ended the movie an hour early (from 'it's started!' to 'we surrender!' in minutes). I personally would have liked to see them use some kind of alien kung fu--but brave as Shyamalan is insisting on his priorities, apparently he isn't that brave--
--neither does he have good timing. Part of the appeal of The X-Files is the sense of approaching dread, the feel of something vast and apocalyptic involving aliens, paranormal phenomena, and government conspiracies coming nigh. This dread is the nerve the TV series touched, the emotions inextricably tied to the close of the previous millennium. Now we're two years into the next millennium, and series is ended, all those fears and anxieties we suffered counting down to the end of 1999 have come to seem well irrelevant. UFOs will conquer the Earth? The world will coming to an end? It all seems silly now, like New Years' Eve antics from the perspective of the morning after. The only issues that hold any urgency for us nowadays are the evils of government-- and more on corruption than cover-ups and conspiracies--
Defenders of the film say 'it's not about aliens, it's about faith.' At one point Gibson explains to Phoenix "there are two kinds of people in the world:" the first believes in God and signs (or, if you like, superstition and nonsense) the second believes in blind coincidence. The case Shyamalan makes with regards to faith, however, isn't convincing (Yes! Pinned to a tree by a pickup truck, I too can prophesy six months into the future). Presenting the story as ultimately a struggle to achieve spirituality isn't enough; the material (i.e. an alien invasion) has to be believable in the first place.
Shyamalan should take a hint from C. M. Kornbluth, one of the most darkly ironic imaginations in science fiction: his short "The Silly Season" has aliens creating alarming illusions every year, year after year, such that when they finally do attack, everyone's too skeptical to even bother to resist ("The Boy Who Cried Wolf," anyone?). Simple and plausible almost frighteningly so; the fact that the aliens manage to exploit a weakness in our nature is the story's real sting. It's probably a safe bet that Kornbluth is the second kind of person Gibson talked about--someone perfectly capable of saying out loud that a good-looking reverend, a goofy ex-baseball player, and two kids wearing aluminum helmets are not going to win against a real alien invasion. Shyamalan may insist on Signs being basically about belief; he's certainly succeeded in making a skeptic out of me.
First published in Businessworld 8.29.02
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