|
|
|
|
|
The Shameless Sham of M. Night
Shyamalan.
(August 8, 2006) When M. Night
Shyamalan belted out “The Sixth Sense” back in 1999, the film going public
reveled in the psycho-thriller’s chilling somber ambiance and big twist
ending that critics wisely didn’t give away. It earned Shyamalan an Oscar nod
and a wave of kudos. It was pandemic, M. Night Shyamalan was going to be the
next big thing. Newsweek even went so far as to place the soft-featured
director on its cover, dubbing him “the next Steven Spielberg.” But six years and four
films later, things haven’t quite worked out that way as best attested by the
tepid reaction to Shyamalan’s latest, “The Lady in the Water.” Critics widely
panned the film and in its opening week, it only secured third place in the
box office tallies. By week three it had fallen from the top ten. Not exactly
a “Jaws” or “E. T.” blockbuster by any stretch. Where did things go
wrong? They didn’t, or rather
Shyamalan didn’t evolve as a filmmaker. Each of his films is reduced from the
same broth. They are one trick ponies, relying on an arduous set up for the
big payoff at the end, and with each new endeavor, the build up has become
increasingly languorous and preposterous, and the payoff, more and more a
groan from the gut than a brow raised in wonderment and admiration. “The Sixth Sense,” is for
now, Shyamalan’s magnum opus. Like “Pulp Fiction” you can watch it over and
over and be dazzled by the film’s ingenious conceit, each time finding a new
facet of revelation to further your appreciation. “Unbreakable” (2000) too,
while not as well engineered, had its own merits, and serves as testimony to
Shyamalan as a filmmaking force: he jumped into the superhero rat race with
fresh material—not a recycled comic book or TV series from twenty or thirty
years back—and did it without invoking an overwhelming spectacle of computer
generated FX. With “Signs” (2002)
though, the wheels began to come off the Shyamalan machine. The film, an
unofficial retooling of “War of the Worlds,” demanded a big scope—after all
we’re talking about a worldwide alien invasion—but Shyamalan eschewed the
broad and again kept the action tightly based in his beloved rural
Pennsylvania. The slight result didn’t even constitute camp, it was a big
idea delivered with a peashooter. Spielberg would later make the big screen
retelling of the H. G. Wells’s survival saga and that would be as close as
Shyamalan would come to Spielberg. But beyond his penchant
for certain artifice, there were other signs that Shyamalan was losing
focus as a storyteller. He had risen quickly in the filmmaking food chain to
a level where there were no checks and balances. He was on his own and lost
sight of how to deliver a complete entertainment extravaganza that would
punch the suspension of disbelief button and wash over the viewer from frame
one. There were other
distractions too. Perhaps it was Hitchcock
that inspired Shyamalan to appear in his films, but by “Signs,”
Shyamalan had inserted himself as a full-fledged character, playing the
distraught neighbor of Mel Gibson’s fallen priest. (The ironic footnote being
that both characters were seeking redemption, something that the two real
lifers must surely be desperate for after their recent media
depictions). In “The Village” (2004)
he receded to a bit part (probably because an East Indian-American in Shaker
garb would look rather silly), but in “Lady in the Water,” he gave himself a
pivotal role as a writer who is foretold to write a book that would influence
world leaders and change nations. The context of that eerily—almost in a M.
Night Shyamalan sort of way—echoes Newsweek’s prognostication. The reasons for
Shyamalan’s inverted Phoenix are multi-faceted, yet clear. First off, he
can’t act and directing himself in his own material only exacerbates
matters—a lesson Quentin Tarantino learned early on. Then there’s his
incessant need to tell a human tale, even if it has little to do with the
beast at hand. The touches of human character and their flaws Shyamalan added
to “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” are masterstrokes that further the
story, but with “Signs” and “Lady in the Water,” such secondary and tertiary
intricacies consumed the screen and detracted from the main event. “Signs”
was less about gangly men from outer space taking over our planet than it was
about a faith crippled former priest and a once promising ball player, failed
and bitter. And in “Lady in the Water,” if Paul Giamatti’s Cleveland Heep, a
melancholy schlep running from an unhappy past and obviously slumming it as an
apartment complex super, isn’t enough to clog up the screen with wheezy
emotion, there are five or six other colorful characters (especially Bob
Balaban as the cocksure film critic and Freddy Rodríguez as the gym rat who
only works out one side of his body) with their own set of dysfunctions.
Intriguing character study perhaps but little about them folds in with Bryce
Dallas Howard’s water nymph or the wolf beast made of grass that stalks her.
Shyamalan wants to shroud the film in the grandeur of myth and lore, yet in
doing so in such a disconnected and circuitous fashion, nothing adheres. The revelation that Bruce
Willis’s languid seeker of truth in “The Sixth Sense” is actually a dead soul
among the living is an inspired and well-engineered twist. In “Signs”
however, the big punch to thwart marauding aliens was a glass of water and
“swing away”, and in “The Village,” lore about demons who lurk in the
surrounding woods (“those we don’t speak of,” cheesy giant scarecrows) turned
out to be mind control mechanism to maintain a puritan enclave where the
citizens partied like it was 1775, when it was really 2005 beyond the thicket
of trees. Pretty silly stuff when you stop to think about it. And it gets even sillier in “Lady in the
Water.” Grass wolf dogs named scrunts and mermaids called narfs?
(How long did someone sit around to come up with those names and what were
they smoking?) All this hooey we learn from an elderly Korean woman who says
the legend is an old East Asian bedtime story. The irony here being, that as
hard as Shyamalan tries to layer in ethnic/cultural flavor, the more innane
things become. There is absolutely nothing Asian in the utterance of narf or
scrunt. Not that I profess to be an expert in han gol but there is no
rhythmic poetry to those words as one might find when ordering a bowl of bi
bim bap and soaking up the native speak in a Korean restaurant. Say them a
few times, scrunt and narf sound like words kids concoct to define fecal
matter and flatulence. And if that’s not enough
to invoke pause, then consider a narf building a cavernous abode at the
bottom of a hotel styled pool right smack-dab in the middle of a housing
complex compound. The existence—let alone the logistics of the construction
process—of such is inconceivable, almost like a skating rink in the backseat
of a Mini Cooper. And Shyamalan seems to know this. He never shows us the
room situated at the bottom of the pool, instead we get Cleveland swimming to
the bottom of the not so deep, deep end, then opening the drain cover (12 x
12, if that) and the next thing you know, he’s in some never ending,
underwater labyrinth. It’s a sloppy spectacle that blows any suspension of
disbelief right out of the water. One could spend hours wracking their brain
about such matters (such as why the narf must wait for an eagle to take her
to “the blue world,” when Cleveland could just toss her in his car and drive
her the two hours to the seashore) but that would be putting far more thought
into the film than Shyamalan did. Shyamalan’s next film
will be critical. Even though he’s lost commercial and critical favor, folk
still associate him with the intricate story telling wizardry of “The Sixth
Sense” and not his most recent “Splash” cum freaky mystery dud. He’s got one
more shot, and he should weigh it wisely, because if he keeps going as he
has, his enigmatic flameout will be a footnote to “The Sixth Sense.” - TBM |
|
|
|
|
|