The Big Whatsit

When I think of the main reasons I have for writing this journal, apart from the obvious ‘Well, I like films, don’t I?’ one of the biggies would be an abiding sense of restlessness. I have a full-time job that is really boring but it pays decently, to the extent that when I look at what else is out there it seems I might either have to take a substantial pay cut, or invent a raft of new skills in order to progress. That’s not a moan, by the way. My lot could by much worse, I’m sure. What I am left with, however, is a feeling that my brain is never fully engaged. Quite the opposite. As I do my 37-hour week, the grey matter has time to recline on a sunbed next to the pool, flicking through vacuous celebrity gossip magazines, or gossiping with its mates down at the hairdresser’s.

The upshot is that I don’t often get enough sleep. At around the 4.00 am mark, my brain is gently but insistently tapping me awake, whispering ‘Come on, it’s the day, give me food.’ The result is this here journal, an effort to channel my thoughts into something because, well, I like films, don’t I, and because it’s less time consuming and the consequences more certain than trying to write a book.

Another thing that makes me feel restless (Reader’s Voice - ‘Finally! The point is reached!’) is the work of M Night Shyamalan. He’s a writer-director who I used to really like, who seemed to try so hard to be Alfred Hitchcock, but who has clearly over-indulged to the point of irrelevance over the course of his career. M Night is two years older than me, yet he already appears to have undergone an entire arc, one that isn’t moving in the right direction. His films have never been the most briskly paced affairs. Sometimes spectacularly slow, it used to be the mounting suspense and sheer love of the characters that stopped his movies from becoming ponderous. That is until we reached The Village, which was simply too silly and preposterous to allow for the big chunks where nothing much at all happened. My feeling, horribly enough, was a familiar one of restlessness, and it’s this that has made me so ambivalent about seeing Lady in the Water.

But let’s go back to The Sixth Sense, a film so well constructed that it’s difficult to imagine the same person is behind both its taut thrills and The Village’s excesses. Everyone loves a good bit of show and tell, and this is about as good a slice of mystery theatre as we’ve had until The Prestige. Not only is the film really well acted, it’s driven by a story so compelling that you’re not even aware of the final twist until all the other threads have been resolved. The slowness that punctuated M Night’s later works don’t seem quite so pervasive here either. We care about Cole (Haley Joel Osmont) early enough that the patient peeling back of his ‘problem’ happens naturally, and with sufficient lashings of dramatic tension. The relationship between Cole and his mum (Toni Colette) seems very natural. It’s not hard to compare her mixture of love and frustration with the real feelings of any mother when confronted with something she doesn’t understand, and Colette’s acting is good enough to pull off a genuine pain-filled performance.

On top of everything else, The Sixth Sense is pretty damn scary. Long before we see the film’s first ghost (spoiler-mongers would of course argue that it’s on screen long before the appearance of woman in the kitchen, but let’s not go there), it’s fairly creepy, Cole coming across as nothing less than a bag of nerves. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) wants to help, yet even he realises he’s entirely out of his depth once he gets his horrific reveal of the boy’s problem. Able to see dead people all… the… time, we get insights into Cole’s terrifying life. He can’t even walk past a school hall without seeing hanged people staring back at him, and in an old city like Philadelphia, it’s easy to believe the ghosts are everywhere.

The movie generated enough clamour, not to mention a slew of Oscar nominations, for M Night’s next effort to be the subject of eager anticipation. Unbreakable was the result, a more costly affair and one that really divided its critics. Telling the story of a man who comes to realise that he is in fact a superhero, it was bold enough to be a much slower and more sober look at such a caricature’s origins. Whilst the likes of X-Men stayed close to its comic book roots, Unbreakable’s ordinary hero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis, never better) comes to terms with his abilities gradually and painfully, even though he already has a hero worshipper in the shape of his son, and a nemesis. Despite the subject matter, the film is character based, focusing ever on Dunn and being there to follow his revelations as he experiences them.

For all that I like the film, it’s not as good as its predecessor. Noticeably more plodding, this isn’t such a bad thing normally, though it begs the question of whether the central conceit is less gripping as that of The Sixth Sense. That aside, the earlier movie was a chillfest from the start. Unbreakable doesn’t have anything to match that, other than the viewer being worried that fragile Sam Jackson might hurt himself. And he does.

What Unbreakable does have going for it is a superb central turn from an actor not known for his thespianic subtleties, and for his next trick, M Night tried to coax similar genius from Mel Gibson. Not that ‘Gibbo’ can’t act. Far from it, yet on Signs‘ release, he was still more noted as an action star, albeit one with a Best Director Oscar tucked under his claymore (I wonder what M Night made of that). Also appearing in the small cast is Joaquin Phoenix, best known at this point for his two-dimensional Commodus in the ’style over substance’ Gladiator, yet a rising star nonetheless. There are also some kids, who play pivotal roles as in M Night’s previous films, and an ill-judged cameo by the director himself.

But that isn’t Signs’ worst flaw. A movie I bought upon its DVD release, based entirely on what I thought of his earlier stuff, it turned out to be something of a disappointment. To begin with, it makes the rather quaint assertion that crop circles are created by alien visitors, long after they’d been debunked and lost their mysterious lustre. Arthur C Clarke wouldn’t bother wasting his mysterious world on them, and neither should a major motion picture. Yet here they are, being treated as important plot devices. Signs is also very, very slow. ‘Signs of Life’ might be a more appropriate title for it, as long periods are punctuated with nothing much at all happening. When the reasons for the steady build-up of certain plot strands become clear, they don’t seem to be justified. For instance, there’s a long exploration of Merrill’s (Phoenix) spluttering career as a baseball player, yet why we would need to know this is revealed in a split second that doesn’t support the story’s development. Then there’s the whole story arc concerning Graham (Gibson) and his loss of faith. It’s possible to believe that Mel only agreed to take the part if his character and God were reconciled by the end of the film, and they are, but the reasons for this don’t make an awful lot of sense.

And don’t get me started on the concept of aliens that are allergic to water deciding to invade the Earth…

Still, Signs isn’t a bad film on the whole. It’s disappointing compared with what came before, but in its own right, it makes for an entertaining couple of hours. On a technical level, it’s better than The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, with a very strong visual sense. Crops have rarely looked better, and there’s a palpable sense of claustrophobia surrounding the Hess family’s house, especially during the night, when M Night makes superb use of old-fashioned light and shadow.

Worse was to follow. In this gentle slide of diminishing returns, our hero returned in 2004 with The Village. This for all the world plays like a Stephen King short story that has somehow been made into a 108-minute movie. At its heart it’s still a short story, so the plot has been bloated with a raft of filler material, set ups, red herrings, and long, lingering depictions of the villagers and their love of a simple life. By this point, M Night’s films were famous for ‘The Twist,’ the big reveal that had started with The Sixth Sense and underpinned every movie since. Only in The Village, the revelation is about as shocking and unexpected as the identity of the Labour Party’s next leader. The previous films’ twists worked because they came as genuine surprises, often hidden under swathes of plot so dense that they were genuine treats for those who stayed until the end. Not so here. Once the big twist takes place, it does so with a collective ‘oh’ from the viewers, and it undermines the entire effort.

Elsewhere, the movie doesn’t really do enough to recommend itself. Its cast is perfectly fine, including various stalwarts - Brendan Gleeson, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt - who will always turn in reliable performances, and spearheaded by the remarkable Bryce Dallas Howard. Adrien Brody is wasted somewhat, and Joaquin Phoenix’s principal reason for being involved seems to be solely to provide an early twist. As with Signs, it’s well made on a cinematography front, M Night’s visual sense growing with experience. However, the effort as a whole is flimsy. Its premise is far too slight to support a full-length movie. I can see it working as an episode of The Outer Limits, yet anything longer than an hour and you can almost see everyone involved trying to think of things to do with the rest of the time.

Let’s be honest. After the results of this sliding scale, things aren’t looking too good for Lady in’t Water, are they? Facing the worst reviews of the lot so far, M Night’s comment that this is a very personal film doesn’t sound very encouraging. To hammer the point home, I’ve even compiled this graph, based on the IMDb User Rating for each of his movies thus far (forget Wide Awake - everyone else has):

It doesn’t take a genius to see where all this is heading, does it? Next year sees the release of The Happening, which by the law of averages should score around the 5.8 mark. No doubt, by 2020 M Night will bring out his remake of Plan 9 from Outer Space, starring Bruce Willis as Bela Lugosi. The critics will consider it impossibly worse than the original, and it will be the first film to zero out on ‘Earth’s biggest movie database.’

Then again, maybe not. Though I agree roughly with the gradual downslide in quality of M Night’s movies, I haven’t actually seen Lady in the Water, and that’s something I should change. After all, Paul Giamatti isn’t known for starring in bobbins, and I always live in hope that the movie will overcome its critical ravaging and turn out to be quite decent. I live in hope, just like I do of getting a good night’s sleep. See you in the early hours!