nathanzoebl

Originally released July 30, 2004:

When saying director names you can play a fun little game of word association. Someone says, ““George Lucas,”” and things like big-budget effects, empty storytelling, and wooden dialogue come to mind. Someone says, ““David Lynch,”” and weird, abstract, therapy sessions dance in your head. The behemoth of word association is M. Night Shyamalan. He burst onto the scene with 1999’’s blockbuster, The Sixth Sense, a crafty, moody, intelligent thriller with a knock-out final twist. Now, though, it seems more and more evident that while The Sixth Sense was the making of M. Night Shyamalan, it also appears to be his undoing. His follow-up films, Unbreakable and Signs, have suffered by comparison, but what seems to be hampering Shyamalan’’s growth as a writer is the tightening noose of audience expectation that he kowtows to.

With this in mind, we have Shyamalan’s newest cinematic offering, The Village. Set in 1897, we follow the simple, agrarian lives of the people that inhabit a small secluded hamlet. The town is isolated because of a surrounding dense forest. Mythical creatures referred to as “Those We Don’t Speak Of” populate the woods. An uneasy truce has been agreed upon between the creatures and the villagers, as long as neither camp ventures over into the other’s territory. When someone does enter the woods, foreboding signs arise. Animals are found skinned, red marks are found on doors, and people worry that the truce may be over. Within this setting, we follow the ordinary lives of the townsfolk. Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the daughter of the town’s self-appointed mayor (William Hurt), and doesn’’t let a little thing like being blind get in the way of her happiness. She is smitten with Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix), a soft-spoken loner. Noah (Adrien Brody), a mentally challenged man, also has feelings for Ivy, which cause greater conflict.

Arguably, the best thing about The Village is the discovery of Howard. She proves herself to be an acting revelation that will have future success long after The Village is forgotten. Her winsome presence, wide radiant smile, and uncanny ability to quickly endear the character of Ivy to the audience. She is the only one onscreen with genuine personality and charisma, and when she’s flirting and being cute about it you cannot help but fall in love with her. And when she is being torn up inside, the audience feels the same emotional turmoil. I am convinced that this is more so from Howard’’s acting than from the writing of Shyamalan. She reminds me of a young Cate Blanchett, both in features and talent.

It seems to me that Shyamalan’’s directing is getting better with every movie while his writing is getting proportionately worse. He has a masterful sense of pacing and mood, creating long takes that give the viewer a sense of unease. The first arrival of the creatures is an expertly handled scene that delivers plenty of suspense, and a slow-motion capper, with music swelling, that caused me to pump my fist. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is beautifully elegant. Even the violin-heavy score by James Newton Howard is a great asset to the film’’s disposition.

So where does the film go wrong and the entertainment get sucked out?

What kills is its incongruous ending. Beforehand, Shyamalan has built a somewhat unsettling tale, but when he finally lays out all his cards, the whole is most certainly not more than the sum of its parts. In fact, the ending is so illogical, and raises infinitely more questions than feeble answers, that it undermines the rest of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense, the twist of The Village does not get better with increased thought.

Shyamalan’’s sense of timing with his story revelations is maddening. He drops one twist with 30 minutes left in the film, but what’’s even more frustrating is he situates a character into supposed danger that the audience knows doesn’t exist anymore with this new knowledge. The audience has already been told the truth, and it deflates nearly all the tension. It’’s as if Shyamalan reveals a twist and then tells the audience to immediately forget about it.

Shyamalan also exhibits a problem fully rendering his characters. They are so understated that they don’t ever really jump from the screen. The dialogue is very stilted and flat, as Shyamalan tries to stubbornly fit his message to ye olde English vernacular (which brings about a whole other question when the film’’s final shoe is dropped). Shyamalan also seems to strand his characters into soap opera-ish subplots involving forbidden or unrequited love. For a good hour or so, minus one sequence, The Village is really a Jane Austin story with the occasional monster.

The rest of the villagers don’’t come away looking as good as Howard. Phoenix’’s taciturn delivery seems to suit the brooding Lucius, but at other times he can give the impression of dead space. Hurt is a sturdy actor but can’t find a good balance between his solemn village leader and caring if sneaky father. Sigourney Weaver just seems adrift like she’’s looking for butter to churn. Brody is given the worst to work with. His mentally-challenged character is a terrible one-note plot device. He seems to inexplicably become clever when needed.

The Village is a disappointment when the weight of the talent involved is accounted for. Shyamalan crafts an interesting premise, a portent sense of dread, and about two thirds of a decent-to-good movie, but as Brian Cox said in Adaptation, “”The last act makes the film. Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws and problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”” It’’s not that the final twists and revelations are bad; it’’s that they paint everything that came before them in a worse light. An audience going into The Village wanting to be scared will likely not be pleased, and only Shyamalan’s core followers will walk away fully appreciating the movie. In the end, it may take a village to get Shyamalan to break his writing rut.

Nate’s Grade: C+

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Usually in the M. Night Shyamalan narratives, 2004’s The Village is where the cracks first started to show in the filmmaker’s game. While 2000’s Unbreakable didn’t exactly reach the box-office successes of The Sixth Sense and Signs, it still earned $250 million worldwide and was definitely ahead of the cultural curve, introducing a grounded superhero story before the oncoming wave of superhero cinema. No, it was The Village that started the questioning over whether Shyamalan’s need for big twist endings was hampering his creativity. While still earning almost the exact same box-office as Unbreakable, The Village was seen with more hesitation, a cautionary tale about a filmmaker, as Matt Singer recently put it, flying a little too close to the sun. From here, Shyamalan entered his down period, from 2006’s Lady in the Water, to 2008’s The Happening, and the big-budget sci-fi misfits of 2010’s Last Airbender and 2013’s After Earth. This was the beginning of the general public becoming wise to Shyamalan’s tricks.

The real kicker is that, twenty years later, it’s clear to me that The Village is two-thirds of a good-to-great movie, ultimately undone by the unyielding desire to juice up the proceedings with an outlandish twist ending. For that first hour, Shyamalan has done a fine job of dropping us into this outdated community, learning their rules and restrictions, and gradually feeling the dread that the old ways might not protect them from the monsters just along the boundaries. There’s an efficiency and confidence to that first hour, with carefully planned shots that establish key points of information, like little girls panicking at the sight of a red flower and burying it in the ground before going back to their chores. The cinematography is elegant and moody, and the violin-soaring score by James Newton Hoard is a consistent emotive strength. The first encounter with the monsters roaming around the town is fraught with tension, especially as our one character holds out her hand waiting for her friend/love interest to return. The cloaked monsters are also just a cool design, with their long claws and porcupine-like frills extending from their hides.

The greatest strength is Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World) as our surprise protagonist, Ivy, daughter of the community founder, Edward Walker (William Hurt). Howard had made small cameo roles in her father’s films, but she was cast by Shyamalan after he watched her perform on stage. She is spellbinding as Ivy, a woman of great vulnerability and strength, of integrity and charisma. The scene where she sits down on the porch beside Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and dance around the edges of flirting is sensational, and when she talks about seeing people’s colors, or auras, and then smirkingly whispers, “No, I will not tell you your color, stop asking,” in the same breath, I defy anyone not to fall in love with her like poor Lucius. This simple love story actually works well. Lucius is an introverted man given to great emotions he doesn’t know how to fully express, which pairs nicely with the chatty and ebullient Ivy. The protagonist shift works wonderfully as well. For the first hour we believe we’re following Lucius as our main character, especially since at this point Phoenix’s star power was rising and Howard had none. Then, with the sudden sticking of a knife, Lucius is taken down and the movie becomes Ivy’s story and her quest to save her beloved. Her cry of not being able to see Lucius’ color is a well-coordinated punch to the gut. This is an example of a rug pull that really works, elevating the stakes and presenting the real star, the girl so many have overlooked for one reason or another, who will be our hero when we need her most.

But then it all falls apart for me once Shyamalan reveals two twists: 1) the monsters are not real, merely costumes the adults wear to enforce their rules through fear, 2) the setting of this village is not 1897 but modern-day, with the villagers living in a secluded nature preserve. Apparently, Edward was able to gather enough violent crime victim relatives to begin this experiment in “returning to our roots.” He served as an American History professor, so who better than to create a thriving community? You know how to establish safe drinking water there, my guy? How about cabin-building? I assume one of the elders must have had some wealth as it’s revealed later, via Shyamalan’s onscreen cameo role, that the government got paid off to stop having airplanes fly over the nature preserve. I actually kind of hate this twist. It feels the most superfluous of all Shyamalan’s fabled twist endings. I was genuinely enjoying the movie and how it was spinning up until this point, but Shyamalan cannot leave well enough alone. I get that Shyamalan is crafting an allegory for the War on Terror and the constant anxiety of post-9/11 America, replete with color codes meant to serve as warning signs. I get that we’re meant to find the town elders as villains, keeping their community repressed through the fear of convenient monsters. The lessons are there to dissect, but I’m disappointed because I was enjoying the allegory on its literal level more than its intended themes. It’s also because I feel like the twists overburden the movie’s charms.

Another reason the twist really falters is that it creates all sorts of nagging questions that sabotage whatever internal logic had been earlier accepted. Adults deciding to break free from modern society so they can start their own secluded LARP community can work as a premise, but it requires a lot more examination that cannot happen when it’s slotted as a concluding twist. Imagine the kind of determination it would take to retreat from modern society and rekindle an agrarian life from hundreds of years ago. That means abandoning all your family, friends, the comforts of modern-day, and the sacrifices could have been explored, but again, it’s just a twist. There are present-day communities, most famously the Amish, that shun the technological advances of modern society to retain an outdated sense of homespun culture and religious community, but often the members have grown up in this culture already. Regardless, retreating into the woods to start your own 18th century cosplay is a commitment, but when you know all the adults are in on this secret, why are they staying in character at all times? When it’s just two adults talking to one another, why are they keeping to their “characters” and talking in that antiquated jargon and syntax? Is it collective Method acting? Is it a sign they’ve ref-ramed what they consider normal? Have they gone so deep that their muscle memory is to say “thee” and “thou” vernacular in the mirror? They went through this elaborate facade because they lost people in the “real world,” but human impulses, violence, and accidents can occur in any community, no matter if you got cell phones or pitchforks. It starts to gnaw away at the tenuous reality of the scenario, a reality I was accepting until the late rug pull.

It also eliminates some of the stakes of Act Three when Ivy travels beyond the boundaries and may face the wrath of the monsters. It’s maddening that Shyamalan reveals the monsters are not real, mere tools to scare the children into obedience, and then has a supposed suspense sequence where Ivy stumbles upon a thicket of red flowers, the dreaded color the monsters hate. But wait, you might recall, there are no monsters, so then why does it matter? When you realize that her dad could just have taken a hike and driven to a drug store to gather medical supplies, without the supernatural threat keeping them confined, it kind of seems silly. Here you were, worried about the fate of this blind girl, when there’s no reason she had to even venture into this danger because one of the adults could have performed the same task without risking their big secret. I know they think Ivy’s blindness might uphold their secret, but why even risk her possible danger from falling down a hill she couldn’t see or a rock that twists her ankle? Her dad would rather have his blind daughter venture into the woods than do this trek “to the next town” himself. At the same time, her personal journey outside the community is robbed of the supernatural danger and it also re-frames the father as someone burdening his blind daughter with a task he could have achieved. He says she has the power of love and that will guide here, but you know a compass could also help. You could make the argument that maybe his guilt was eating away at upholding such a big secret, maybe he wanted to get caught, but I don’t buy it. Edward argues with his fellow elders that it is the next generation that will keep hold to their traditions and ways of life, and they must ensure this survival. That doesn’t sound like the perspective of a man wishing to break apart the close-knit community he helped build.

What to make of Adrien Brody’s mentally challenged character, Noah? He’s living in a time that doesn’t know how to handle his condition, but he’s also set up as a quasi-villain. He’s the one who stabs Lucius out of jealousy that Ivy favors him. He’s the one who breaks free, steals a monster get-up, and antagonizes Ivy in the woods. He also falls into a pit and dies alone. I don’t really know how to feel about this character because I don’t think Shyamalan exactly knows what to do with him.

Having recently re-read my original 2004 review, I’m amazed that I am sharing almost the exact same response as I did with my younger self. Even some of the critical points have similar wording. My concluding summation still rings true for me: “It’s not that the final twists and revelations are bad; it’’s that they paint everything that came before them in a worse light.” You can rightly tell an allegorical story about people rejecting modern society and living a secluded and hidden life. You can rightly tell a story about adults posing as monsters to keep their children in line and obedient. However, if you’re going to be telling me that story, don’t supply an hour’s worth of setup that will be damaged from these revelations. After The Village, it was a steady decline for the filmmaker once dubbed “the next Spielberg” until 2017’s stripped down thriller Split, anchored by a tour de force performance from James McAvoy. It’s frustrating to watch The Village because it has so much good to offer but ultimately feels constrained by the man’s need to follow a formula that had defined him as a mass market storyteller. This was a turning point for Shyamaln’s fortunes, but the quality of The Village has me pleading that he could have shook off the need for ruinous twists and just accepted the potency of what was already working so well.

Re-View Grade: B-