Tag: M. Night Shyamalan

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Old

Vicky Kreips and Gael García Bernal aging on the beach in Old.

“What movie did you see?” asked my friend Sarah. 

“Old,” I said. “The new M. Night Shyamalan.” 

“Oh. How was it?” 

“Meh. I didn’t hate it,” I said. 

“Wow. That’s quite an endorsement, coming from you!” she said. 

It’s true. I’m on record as not being a Shyamalan fan. More precisely, I hate his movies. It’s not personal. I’m sure he is a lovely person who is kind to animals. And I respect his skills. It’s obvious from even the most cursory examination of films like The Village and Signs that this is a guy who has memorized every frame Alfred Hitchcock ever shot. It’s just that he’s terribly one note, and not nearly the writer a generation of producers seem to think he is. After hitting with The Sixth Sense, he’s leaned on his signature gimmick of the late-film plot twist. Take The Happening, for example, where he sets up a high concept premise, treads water for an hour, then belly flops when he tries to resolve it cleverly. 

(While I’m busy pissing cinephiles off, I recently watched the Turner Classic Movies tribute to another Hitch worshipper, Brian de Palma, and decided he’s also a hack.) 

Anyway, Old is Shyamalan’s return to the theaters after two box office successes, Split and Glass. You’ve got to admire the commitment to short titles. Old starts with a young family heading to a beach vacation at the all-inclusive Anamika Resort on an island off the coast of Mexico. The marriage of the not very creatively named Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) is on the rocks. They’re trying to keep it from their son Trent (played at this point by Nolan River) and daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton, initially), but they’re not doing a very good job. When Trent plays with his action figures, they argue like mom and dad. 

The hotel, though, is super nice, and the staff so attentive that they seem to know everything about their guests. Kinda spooky, right? It gets spookier: The resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) has the same energy as that guy in the Chevy commercials who plays sinister pranks on unsuspecting consumers. (“We’ve kidnapped your family to highlight all the features you’re going to love on our all-new Chevy Abductor crossover SUV.”)  The manager offers to transport the family to a secret, secluded beach where nothing bad can happen.

Spoiler alert: Bad things happen. 

Nolan River is one of four actors who play Trent at various ages in Old.

Once at the beach, Guy (is that a placeholder name that stuck?) and Prisca (was she once called “Girl?”) discover they’re not the only ones invited to this “exclusive” deserted beach. There’s also Charles (Rufus Sewell), a doctor; his wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee); daughter Kara (played at age 11 by Mikaya Fisher); and mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant). Lurking on a beach is a guy who Maddox recognizes as a rapper named— I kid you not — Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre). They soon find that they’re trapped on the beach, and aging at an unnaturally fast rate. 

Aaron Pierre plays a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan. No, seriously.

In the big picture of horror movie settings to get trapped in with a group of disposable characters, of which you might be one, I’d say a secluded beach is probably the best you could hope for. Usually, it’s a haunted mansion or a deserted farmhouse surrounded by zombies or an eastern European hostel with a secret basement torture chamber. I have to admit, as Shyamalan went through his usual paces of stilted dialogue and obvious, studio-note exposition, I occasionally zoned out and just watched cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ vibrant images of the surf rolling in.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t gag my way through Old. Or maybe it’s because the premise is taken from one of my favorite Ray Bradbury short stories, “Frost and Fire,” in which survivors of a spaceship crash discover that the alien planet’s radiation ages them a lifetime in only eight days, and it takes generations to effect an escape. Or maybe I’m just starved for entertainment. 

 Old never rises to Bradbury’s plane of contemplation, but at least it tries to explore the psychic side of aging as the ultimate body horror. Unlike, say, being dismembered at summer camp or transforming into a giant man-fly, it’s a horror scenario we will all face — if we’re lucky. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Glass

“How much of human life is lost in waiting?” is a line by Emerson quoted in one of the worst movies of all time, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I could not help but think of it while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the capper to a trilogy that took 20 years to make. It started with 2000’s Unbreakable, a drama whose ending twist explained that it was really the prologue to the adventures of a superhero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and a mad genius, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). 2017’s Split was about James McAvoy’s dissociative identity disorder-suffering villain, The Beast, with an ending twist that this took place in the same universe as the previous film, with the director resurrecting earlier characters. Glass is here to let these superbeings finally be unbound, which it tries to accomplish by stranding them in an insane asylum and locking them in cells for most of the film.

Shyamalan was hailed as a wunderkind after The Sixth Sense. He quickly fell into self-parody: His twists strayed to left field, his quirky dialogue turned odd. I prefer his films when they got weird. The Village has so much craft and prestige wrapping its silly, trashy plot. The Happening had none, and I love it the most: the cast speaking entirely in non sequiturs about a world taken over by angry plants, who in the end are defeated by love. Pure, glorious schlock.

Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is good at dramatizing neurotic childhood fears of loneliness and abandonment, but when the emotion becomes positive, it gets manipulative. Orchestral music tells you to feel happy, but you might feel alienated instead. Shyamalan is great at showy long takes. He loves to hold on a medium or close-up reaction shot well past the point most movies cut. It’s both economical and unnerving.

I watched all of his unclassifiable trilogy in one day, like a child forced to smoke a pack of cigarettes in order to hate them. Unbreakable is a dour retread of The Sixth Sense, enlivened by Jackson in a purple jacket and shock hair dramatizing the nightmare of brittle bone disease. Split is buoyed by McAvoy.

Unfortunately, Glass is horrible, but it’s as odd and idiosyncratic as his other films. Psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures Dunn and The Beast and moves them into an asylum with Glass. She tries to convince them that their superheroic abilities are just delusions. When Dunn believes her, he does so because the story needs to sideline him, and the seams of threadbare writing start to show. Most of the budget may have gone to the salaries of the three headliners, and their schedules might not have connected, as they rarely share the same screen.

For half the runtime, Jackson is in a comatose state, staring emptily from a wheelchair, and when he wakes he says meta lines that might have been fresh 20 years ago, when Unbreakable opened with text explaining what comic books are.

Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton has pointed out that Shyamalan is a religious storyteller. He often shows characters needing to believe in themselves, their family, and the afterlife. This is usually expressed in a spiritual way and affirmed with an inspirational twist. This faith serves an additional role of keeping expensive special effects to a minimum.

In what other superhero movie would the final fight between good and evil (in a parking lot) cut away at first punch to the viewpoint of nameless extras looking at a van? Or be preceded by Jackson pointing at a skyscraper where the fight would have occurred had the film had more money? Shyamalan is interested in not just twists, but delayed gratification.

In the theater on opening weekend, you could feel the excitement slowly go out of the audience. The final twist here is a conscious wrongheaded choice that is bugfuck in its disconnection from viewers’ enthusiasm, yet lovely for its wrongness. Marvel is sleek and sometimes great, but when it doesn’t fire on all cylinders, it smothers you like a committee-made sitcom. Glass is terrible but at least feels personal.

The finale doesn’t work as storytelling, but it might make sense as an accidental middle finger to the idea that superheroes are inherently inspirational, when the reason for their omnipresence is monetary, as with westerns and Roman movies before them. Remove the money, and you lose the faith.

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Film Features Film/TV

Shyamalan’s latest: clumsy, gimmicky.

Maudlin, sluggish, bland, and undeniably sincere, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is a change of pace when set against the extravagant, hollow-brained mayhem of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. But its inadequacy and clumsiness as a work of entertainment, much less a work of art, make it as forgettable and regrettable as every other summer blockbuster so far.

The Happening opens in “Central Park, New York City, 8:33 AM”: A Day Like Any Other has begun. However, once the wind in the trees picks up, mundane everyday existence is disrupted. People begin to freeze, repeat themselves, and walk backward. Then the really odd stuff occurs, as citizens stab themselves with hairpins, fling themselves from rooftops, and kill themselves without compunction or reason.

News of these strange goings-on in New York travel quickly to Philadelphia, where strident, mystical science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is one of the many teachers at his school told to cancel classes and leave town. As the mysterious “toxin” causing the deaths continues to envelop the Northeast, Moore takes his skittish wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his math-teacher friend Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) away from the big city and into the country. Once they’ve supposedly outrun the threat, they land in Filbert, Pennsylvania, where Moore says to Jess, “We’re in a small town. Nothing can happen to us here.” Needless to say, Elliot is soon proven wrong.

When evaluating a movie that relies so much on genre conventions for its emotional effects, a telling comparison with another artist can be useful. The Happening is a dreary, shuffling homunculus compared to Steven Spielberg’s brilliant 2005 retelling of War of the Worlds. Like The Happening, War of the Worlds raided the same cellar of apocalyptic sci-fi clichés (ominous yet perspicacious news bulletins, hillbilly survivalist weirdos, threatening open spaces) but achieved far more subtle and horrifying emotional effects. Ironically, in 1999, Newsweek declared Shyamalan “the New Spielberg” based on the success of Shyamalan’s film The Sixth Sense.

A decade later, Newsweek‘s proclamation looks ridiculous. Shyamalan’s work has gotten more uncertain, gimmicky, and tentative since then, while Spielberg has been on a magnificent creative roll since 2001’s AI: Artificial Intelligence. Even Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Spielberg’s worst movie of the decade, has moments of visual élan (the car reflected in the hubcap, Indy regarding a mushroom cloud) that Shyamalan has never approached.

The chief source of interest in this film comes from watching Shyamalan try to cast off his image as Mr. Twist Ending and become a more serious artist, whatever that means. This split is most evident in the contrasting ways the director handles large spectacles and more intimate moments. There’s a misguided classical feel to the violent set pieces. Shyamalan often uses out-of-focus background events and offscreen sound to suggest rather than show the horrible effects of the airborne menace. Yet he goes in the opposite direction when he’s directing actors, using scores of extreme close-ups that repeatedly and erroneously equate camera proximity with emotional intimacy. These are mistakes that the person he was supposed to replace in the film world has long since outgrown.

The Happening

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