Summer of Redemption!

Two updates in the same month...shocking, I know.

Today, as the first taste of the Summer of Redemption, I would like to talk a little bit about M Night Shyamalan’s fourth film, The Village (all the stuff he made before The Sixth Sense doesn’t count and you know it). I don’t claim to be the founder of the “I Hate M Night” club, but I do know that I was a pretty early member. I was not charmed or amused by The Sixth Sense at all, and went into all of his movies after that with my mind pretty much made up.¹ As I’ve grown older – and wiser, ideally – I’ve tried to curb the instinct that leads to such uninformed contempt.

Nevertheless, it’s hard for me to watch a film and find it redeemable when I know that at some point the rug is going to be pulled out from underneath me. This is one of the reasons why Psycho does so many things well than pretty much all of Shyamalan’s films do pretty damn poorly: Hitchcock’s films do not always have a “twist,” and even then the endings don’t always rewrite the entire movie (as they do in The Sixth Sense). This is also one of the reasons why Unbreakable is Shyamalan’s best film, because I expected a twist that changed everything and was pleasantly surprised when there was none. The twist in The Sixth Sense changes the meaning of every single scene in the film, even if it means making those scenes incomprehensible and otherwise impossible. Unbreakable is not fundamentally changed by its ending, and the narrative of the film is not damaged by the reality of the story. It is unquestionably Shyamalan’s best film by any criteria.² The unfortunate part is that I didn’t see Unbreakable until long after I first watched The Village. If I had, The Village might have had a fighting chance.

In retrospect, I admit that I first watched The Village – to quote myself³ – “like an asshole”: I didn’t give the film much opportunity to win me over and scrutinized every single detail so that I could justify hating it. One of my close friends watched The Village in the theatre and told me that he figured out Shyamalan’s twist seven minutes into the movie.⁴ As a result, I went to see The Village in the theatre myself, and I was determined to figure out the twist as soon as possible and locate every possible moment when that twist conflicted with the narrative of the film.⁵ Like my friend, I figured out the secret to The Village about ten minutes into the movie, but then wrote off that explanation because, frankly, it was just too stupid.⁶ Then when it turned out that I was right, I was completely dumbfounded.

In the end, the verdict went something like this: Bryce Dallas Howard is a very cute but ultimately annoying actress, Adrien Brody is as unwatchable as ever,⁷ and William Hurt is stiffer than he has ever been. The film is visually beautiful but sloppily composed, often feeling like a puzzle with missing pieces that someone is trying to force together anyway rather than a composed picture. And it goes without saying that the film’s ending is a cheap and childish copout that renders the film virtually meaningless and incomprehensible.⁸

So, after years of putting up with dreck like Lady in the Water and The Happening,⁹ I decided to revisit The Village after a friend told me that it was his favorite of Shyamalan movie. I made an earnest effort to watch the movie in a manner unlike an asshole and tried to follow the story and care about the characters without investing that much in the final reality of the movie.¹⁰ The following is the result of that experiment!

This time around, I actually found the film – particularly the first half – to be a genuinely interesting love story and a surprisingly thrilling mystery. I even think that certain scenes border on being something really great, namely the wedding ceremony and the discussion between Ivy and Lucius on the porch the night after the animals attack. Basically, when the story focuses more on human drama and less on a largely unnecessary monster story, it really thrives. The Village could fit nicely into a more standard formula,¹¹ but it can’t because that’s the way Shyamalan wants it.

This is precisely the tragedy of Shyamalan and his “twists.” If The Village didn’t end the way it did, I would consider it one of the best dramas of the twenty-first century. As much as I find the film enjoyable and redeemable now, the fact remains that The Village still has incredible problems because it is burdened with the brutal weight of Shyamalan’s love of the twist. The love story and all the characters are trivialized by the sheer absurdity of the situation they actually live in. In my eyes, this really prevents Shyamalan’s film from being legitimately great and, similarly, from being completely redeemed. The ending is just so stupid and needless – even after multiple viewings – that it undoes almost everything this film works to create.

Nevertheless, The Village is still a visually captivating film: the design and architecture are beautiful, and the color schemes are wonderful and actually manage to add to the movie. I continue to find William Hurt’s performance incredibly wooden,¹² and the mystery of his character’s relationship with Alice Hunt (Sigourney Weaver) continues to befuddle me. I still have tremendous issues with Bryce Dallas Howard’s performance, but I realized this time around that it was more due to the way Ivy is written than the way Howard interprets the character. It’s not necessarily a matter of her being unable to play a blind character, but rather that her character is supposed to do things that ultimately make her look very silly.¹³

My friend told me that he can overlook a lot that goes on in The Village because he looks at it like a fairy tale. I think the context of the first half of the film allows for that, but after Lucius gets stabbed, the ending of the movie¹⁴ (and the setup leading to it) creates a situation that prevents the rescue-and-salvation mission from really being the stuff of bedtime stories. The biggest issue with this film – which is symptomatic of some other Shyamalan films – is that it feels like two different films fused together. Honestly, watch The Village and ask yourself if the second half feels, looks, or even sounds like the first half. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that M Night had ideas for two separate films and then decided to edit them down and try to make them fit together. Well, I don’t think they do fit together much at all, and the result is a film that really suffers from being somewhat scatterbrained and ultimately inadequate.

So, my feeling at this point is that The Village can certainly be watched and even enjoyed, but one has to give Shyamalan a lot of wiggle room and credit¹⁵ to not feel cheated by what the ending does to this film. It’s sad, really. This film isn’t an unenjoyable story as much as it is an example of failed potential. Shyamalan always feels motivated to do his thing, and worst part is that even when he doesn’t – see Lady in the Water¹⁶ – his storytelling falls right on its face. This, again, is why Unbreakable is Shyamalan’s best film: it is the only time when the revelation of Shyamalan’s “secret” fails (thankfully) to render the story that precedes it a stuttering lie.

I hope this little trip down memory lane was as fun for you as it was for me. Coming up soon: some journal entries, some ramblings about driving, and Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Will it be redeemed? Nobody knows!

¹ – That is, that they would be overwrought, overdirected, sloppily written, and generally unenjoyable. I don’t mince words here: there was nothing I liked about his movies.

² – I really mean it: acting, narrative arc, storytelling, imagery, directing…you name it.

³ – And you can ask anyone I know. I was talking about rewatching this movie for a long time and always said this about myself.

⁴ – He also told me that he pretty much hated it. Full disclosure!

⁵ – Like I said: I watched the movie like an asshole (even though this is an impossibly easy task for one of Shyamalan’s films).

⁶ – You know it, too. Even if you like this movie, you have to admit that the reality of The Village is unbelievably dumb and contrived. No one needs a strong editor more than M Night.

⁷ – And lends a lot of support to the position that there shouldn’t be movies that prominently feature mentally-handicapped characters. Honestly, how many of these performances are not compelling and sensitive but instead derivative and embarrassing? Eighty percent? Ninety?

⁸ – Honestly, how much sense does this movie make once you know the ending? If you go back and watch this film with a focus on what the ending tells you, it is an unbelievably cruel, stupid, and inane story.

⁹ – Lady in the Water is one of the most pathetic movies of the last twenty years, and The Happening (which I only watched for the first time recently) is one of the absolute silliest, most absurd films I’ve ever witnessed.

¹⁰ – This was probably not as hard for me as you might imagine, but it was still probably harder than it should have been.

¹¹ –I know that part of Shyamalan’s supposed charm comes from a refusal to do just this, but it really would be nice if he ever considered something like, you know, genre.

¹² – Yes, I realize that he’s a “man with a secret” and all that. He’s still wooden, even by those standards.

¹³ – Like running around the town and making turns as if she can sense the landscape, or running down the gravel path in the woods and miraculously moving in a straight line the whole time. Actually, most of it is about running. Don’t make blind characters run: it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

¹⁴ – I know I am hammering on about this, but that’s the effect of coming up with these endings that turn the entire film on its head. Just going along with these sorts of things allows filmmakers to cheat you with irrational stuff like this under the pretense of twists that seem “neat.” Fight for your rights, dammit!

¹⁵ – Which, as you might guess, I’m not willing to do.

¹⁶ – As much as I want to call it just another Shyamalan disaster, Lady in the Water doesn’t really fit his pattern at all. In that way, it had every chance to be something great, and turned out to be a real turd.