Lower Decks

In the same way some people will follow certain authors from book to book, there are directors whose new work will always intrigue me, who consistently make insightful and entertaining films. Because this is a site focused primarily on genre interests, I won’t often get to write about such names as Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Ron Howard, Frank Darabont, Richard Donner, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola, Anthony Minghella, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Bryan Singer, Joel Schumacher, Terry Gilliam, or James Cameron. Some of them have spent a fair amount of time engaged in movies that would be pertinent around here, and some I have followed or experienced only in increments, but some, I would gladly devote, if forced to, my life to watching. Most of them have made a favorable, lasting impression on our culture, and need no introduction or explanation. Today I’ll be talking about one more name, who for a time was an unquestioned member of the generally prestigious gathering listed above. Today, he might as well rename himself Rodney Dangerfield. But his name’s M. Night Shyamalan.

I guess I could go digging, but it’s as difficult today to find someone cheering him on as it was when he released his first film, ‘Wide Awake,’ before ‘The Sixth Sense’ made him a household name. August 1999 should by all rights belonged to films to a pair of films already months old, the phenomenon ‘The Matrix,’ and the first of the Star Wars prequels ‘The Phantom Menace,’ both of which made it cool to like traditional sci-fi again. Then a little boy came along and whispered to Bruce Willis, “I see dead people,” and the summer, at the last minute, was stolen by old school horror, reimagined by the new kid on the block, with no pedigree and less flash, and who is probably still best known and remembered for that moment. Horror today can still be traced back to this film, moreso than the revisions of past movies and Japanese remakes.

Shyamalan hasn’t done horror since. He’s constantly reinvented himself, but each new version is burdened by the reputation he built for himself in ‘The Sixth Sense,’ the filmmaker who ends every story with a twist. ‘Unbreakable’ was a superhero story before superhero movies truly became popular again, a fresh take before ‘The Dark Knight’ finally broke the mold, whose “twist” was similar to Bruce-as-ghost only insofar that Samuel L. Jackson’s role was finally revealed to be the villain, Bruce Willis (again) in this ending having a completely different sense of altered tense than before. The first time, it was strictly for the audience, the second time, for the character.

In ‘Signs,’ Shyamalan had his second biggest hit to date, being a lot more explicit about the central appeal of his film, the mysterious crop circles that exist in real life that no one had ever really dealt with before, and piled on the audience candy with a fun turn for Mel Gibson as a family man (hey, this was before ‘The Passion of the Christ’) and aliens attempting another invasion. If there was a twist at all this time, it was simply Gibson’s understanding of something his wife tries to tell him before she dies, a trademark use of inner film logic mythology if anything, that Night employs in all of his films. Critics, while jazzed along with the public by this third offering, had already smelled blood for whatever reason, with ‘Unbreakable.’

So when ‘The Village’ was released, it was his last real hit to date. The critics were ready with their trap. They began in full force to portray Shyamalan’s instincts as repetitive, despite the fact that they clearly weren’t. If he sinned at all, it was his endless desire to style each of his films. Yes, it was increasingly easy to tell what a Shyamalan movie was, but it wasn’t something hinged only on the shock of a final twist, but a story that forces its characters to examine their lives in ways they had previously ignored. In a precursor to the impulse to reject the status quo in an entirely mainstream way, the critics really rejected Shyamalan’s suggestion here that true rebellion doesn’t reject out of spite, but out of an increasing awareness that things simply aren’t what they seem.

‘Lady in the Water’ rests a great deal of its appeal on Paul Giamatti. Somehow the critics, who had been praising the actor a great deal in the previous few years, failed to notice. No, not somehow. It was because they had already decided what to think, because it was an M. Night Shyamalan film, and it was to be buried immediately. Audiences, for the first time, did the same thing. They still don’t know what they’re missing. While I certainly appreciate the work Giamatti did in ‘American Splendor’ and ‘Sideways,’ the two films the critics specifically pointed at, he’s so much better here, and the “bedtime story” Shyamalan weaves around him supports the performance perfectly. If you were to just look at the film for Giamatti’s acting, you would still come away with a favorable impression, which is a testament to Shyamalan’s directing at the very least on one level. It’s the best performance of a lead actor in any of his films to date. Yet it’s not exactly common knowledge. Additionally, if you want to see Shyamalan simply having a little fun, you find a lot of that here as well.

This past summer, ‘The Happening’ solidified Night’s leper status. If you simply went by word of mouth, you’d think, once again, that there was nothing redeeming left in the director’s career to talk about. Yet, once again, I saw it and found that Shyamalan had once again reinvented himself. I came away with an experience unlike anything I’d seen in his five films, an almost vindictive rebuttal on his part that some mysteries, no matter what his critics continually said about his films, simply had no twists, could not be explained away, reduced to trite pieces of trivia. This should have been his statement that he simply cannot be ignored, and a new message about the state of the world at large, that, like the media in his film, doesn’t have all the answers it thinks it does, doesn’t have everything figured out, and is still subject to the same whims of nature as it has always been, long before and long after humans.

Now, of course, he’s embroiled in another controversy as he cast his next film, an adaptation of the popular cartoon series ‘Avatar.’ At least this time it’s the fans of the property and not the critics who are complaining. So far.

Regardless of his reputation, M. Night Shyamalan will remain one of my most trusted filmmakers, someone I can continually turn to as a creative soul bucking trends, making his own, and leaving an unmistakable mark and contribution to the world of movies. As with many topics in the column, this won’t be the last you hear of him here.