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 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 -- 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, with 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 the release of 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, and 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.
--
T. B. Meek |
