Signs Review
by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)September 3rd, 2002
SIGNS
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2002 David N. Butterworth
**1/2 (out of ****)
"Conshohocken's own" M. Night Shyamalan directs--and once again has a small
part in--"Signs," a spooky, supernatural thriller about crop circles, those large, beautifully-designed patterns formed when fields of corn are
mysteriously
flattened overnight by forces unknown. The film takes place in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), a former man of the cloth turned disbeliever following the tragic death of his wife (Shyamalan's Ray Reddy had an unfortunate hand in it), hangs out in a picturesque Victorian farmhouse with
his two children and younger brother Merrill ("Gladiator"'s Joaquin Phoenix) trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. One night Hess's cornfield
becomes nightly news fodder when a crop circle, a phenomenon dismissed as an elaborate, continent-spanning hoax in the 1980s, appears in his cornfield. The film is well done, with plentiful doses of humor (the kind that Gibson does
so well... and you'll never look at aluminum foil in quite the same way again) calculated to offset the seriously creepy stuff. But "calculated" is probably the worst thing about the film. Shyamalan keeps his religious metaphors too close to the surface to be truly interesting, and the film could have been a lot more satisfying had we not seen in the last reel what the writer/director so carefully avoids showing us in the first several. And do we really need to see Hess's wife pinned to a tree? Shyamalan has made these kinds of mistakes
before (see: "The Sixth Sense") and would do better by implying more, and depicting
less. Still, there are genuinely decent performances to savor here, including the principals, Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin as the kids Morgan and Bo (Bo's
water fixation is particularly cute), and Tennessee-born Cherry Jones as a down-to-earth
county cop trying to keep everything in perspective.
--
David N. Butterworth
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