As is usual with M. Night Shyamalan, I took the bait. He’s that rare filmmaker who once made such a good movie that you can’t be faulted for hoping that, even by accident, he’ll do it again. Even if nearly all his output since The Sixth Sense has demonstrated that he’s only a self-important bore.
His 6th film, The Happening, squanders its entire load of reasonably well established good will precisely 42 minutes into the picture, when one character with a perfectly straight face informs us that trees communicate with bushes and bushes communicate with grass.
The movie that precedes this absurd proclamation is pure Shyamalan: exquisite setup dotted with fine moments of strangeness, better-than-average dialogue, and the occasional auteristic marvel. The movie that follows the 42-minute mark is drivel, made sincerely by the other M. Night, the one who thinks he’s brilliant, but is not, and who thinks we are stupid.
To say that this is Shyamalan’s worst movie isn’t saying much, since he’s been paving the way for this turd since he unleashed The Village on us. His sense of style and directorial brilliance have usually saved him, as it nearly did with Signs, a shallow, derivative idea sustained only by a sense of humor and some decent performances. I didn’t see Lady in the Lake because I think Paul Giamatti is overrated and Shyamalan’s incoherent public ramblings about the power of fairy tales smelled like a man who’s spinning in the wake of being caught in a big fat lie. While I have a special place in my heart for his 2nd film, Unbreakable, I’m not sure it’s the great underrated film I once thought it was.
With 6 films under his belt, he now has a large enough oeuvre to strongly evaluate his artistry in empirical light. That light reveals a bit of the disappointing truth one finds under the hood of the Wachowskis, who fell off the boat after the invigorating promise of Bound and The Matrix.
I’ve heard intelligent people compare Shyamalan to Steven Spielberg or Frank Capra, but only with a thin argument related to populism or with the insupportable attribution of “great entertainer.” There isn’t a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or a Pocketful of Miracles in Shayamalan’s version of great entertainment, nor does he have a fraction of Spielberg’s diversity. Ultimately, where Shyamalan fails is in his chronic inability to inject his films with verisimilitude. There’s always that inauthentic gel smeared over every beautifully composed wide-angle shot. Without much deep thought, you can reverse engineer the clever tracking shots and camera angles, charting them back to their storyboard form. Shayamalan’s technique, his obsession with perfect composition, his penchant for self-conscious dialogue, these uncensored impulses trump subtlety or the sort of quiet authority we now take for granted when we watch, say, a p.t. anderson movie.
If The Sixth Sense is M. Night’s Boogie Nights, we’ve seen no evidence that he has within him a Magnolia or a Punch Drunk Love, let alone a There Will Be Blood. This is because Shyamalan’s movies are quintessentially trite, which Oxford defines as “dull on account of overuse.”