The Village

The Village is M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie that, by now, has become something of a shtick - there's always a twist at the end. At some point Night's going to get tired of all this and, like Sam Raimi, will hopefully go on to produce some really great movies that do not have to have a surprising ending. Unfortunately, it seems Night's success has now pigeonholed him and with The Village, the cracks are starting to show.

I appreciate a good surprise twist, but I'm not that easy to fool. I figured out who the real suspect was in The Usual Suspects. The Blair With Project and Fargo did not fool me into thinking they were true stories. But one of the few movies that really did surprise me with the ending was the Sixth Sense, so I gave Night the benefit of the doubt. I loved Unbreakable and liked Signs.

In all three cases, what was great about Night's movies is that they take time to focus on characters. People live their daily lives and then a supernatural element is injected into it. Even better, each plot is easy to summarize in a sentence. I imagine this comes in handy when pitching it to movie studios. For example:

Sixth Sense: Ghosts.
Unbreakable: Superheroes.
Signs: Aliens.

And The Village? "Little Red Riding Hood"

Or rather, "Little Yellow Riding Hood." The movie begins in 1897, focusing on a sleepy Amish-like town where a child has just died. Everyone dresses in black, white, brown, and gray and talks very, very slowly. Nobody uses conjunctions - it's all "You can not," never "You can't."

The characters live out their lives on the screen. Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard, the strikingly beautiful progeny of Ron Howard, who can actually act) is a blind girl in a man's world. She is fearless, in a town that brooks no violence and that is isolated from the rest of the civilization. It is Ivy's blindness and the repetition of the town's activities that sets her free, allowing her to roam as much as anyone who is sighted since things almost never change.

And oh yeah, she can see the color of peoples' auras. Or something like that.

Ivy has a boon companion in the personage of Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), a Pee-Wee-like character who probably suffers from severe attention-deficit disorder. Child-like and tempestuous, he wears his emotions on his sleeve. He's quite smitten with Ivy, a point that becomes relevant later.

Into this curious relationship enters our protagonist for the first half of the movie, Lucius Hunt, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Am I the only one freaked out that Phoenix also played Commodus in Gladiator, who had a nephew named Lucius? Anyway...Phoenix's character is a staid sort who barely talks at all and he plays him with restraint.

The patriarch of the town is Ivy's father, Edward Walker (William Hurt). He is most noteworthy for being the slowest talker of all. Indeed, this seems like the role Hurt was made for - his slow, methodical approach to everything is perfect for this movie. As opposed to say, Lost in Space.

In the background lurks...something. They are the others, the outsiders, literally big bad wolves in red hoods. Are they werewolves? Aliens? Actors who needed the money? I'm not telling, you'll have to see it for yourself. But what's certain is that they live beyond the borders of the village. To go outside in their territory is to provoke them to violence. All the villagers live in fear of them...everyone except Lucius and Noah. When they stray outside the boundaries of the town, the others start showing up in the town to spread signs that they are not happy.

The plot thickens when Ivy and Lucius decide to marry. Tempers flare, someone gets hurt, and the movie finally shifts gears to be what we were hoping it to be: a scary mystery where half the fun is figuring out what's going on.

When Lucius gets hurt, Ivy must journey into the beyond, violating all the rules she's been told about. And she must do it alone, a blind girl wandering through the woods. Forget the scary boogiemen, the poor girl could trip and spear herself in the eye by accident. That's scary enough.

The problem is that the journey is the real meat of the movie and it takes so long to get there. There is one particularly frightening moment in the film that far exceeds the twist (hint: it involves a knife). It's so sudden and so shocking that it certainly made the film worth seeing. Night knows how to shock and, by now, he knows it doesn't have to come in a surprise ending.

And yet, the surprise ending is there like a big, inevitable sign at the end of a long, circuitous road. If you play close enough attention, you'll start to see the signs clearly enough that give it away. I figured it about halfway through the film (another hint: my dad's an architect).

Having guessed the final twist, the rest is a long, drawn out denouement. Yes, this movie is a story about trying to run away from the evil inherent in all humanity. On some level, Night seems to say, you can take the man out of violence, but you can't take the violence out of man. Okay, fine. But must it take so long to get that point across? And must Night lie to make the twist more effective?

Good movie making means maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief. Fargo, and The Blair Witch project all provided us with info that wasn't accurate - and in both cases, the effect was chilling. Here, it feels like a cheap trick. When Night makes a cameo explaining all the other plot holes in his surprise ending, he starts to sound defensive.

This movie should have been a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood's journey. Instead, we get a Twilight Zone episode not worth seeing twice.