The Village Review
by Ryan Ellis (flickershows AT hotmail DOT com)August 2nd, 2004
The Village
reviewed by Ryan Ellis
July 30, 2004
My Tagline---A Fascist Parable: Or How I Learned A Talented Director Can Make A Bomb
Has M. Night Shyamalan surrounded himself with so many "Yes" men that no one will tell him he's made a crappy movie? Power in Hollywood provides a strong insulation from criticism and this incredibly successful young director is his own biggest star. 'The Village' was one of the only summer movies I've been looking forward to seeing, mostly because he made it. The guy has been superb at crafting suspenseful tales. He scares you by methodically creeping you out. His movies were steadily getting better too. 'The Sixth Sense' was okay, 'Unbreakable' was a fascinating follow-up, and 'Signs' left me nearly breathless. However, the ride is over. I'll say what the "Yes" men won't...the emperor has no clothes and his new movie is a pile.
Okay, so let's confirm that there's a constitutional amendment in the works (next in line after gay marriage) that prevents critics from giving away the secrets in a Shyamalan movie. That's not going to be very hard this time because what you don't know at the start of this picture won't interest you by the end of it. A good thriller should involve you in the lives of the characters to the point where you're right with them through their every move. An upside-down plot resolution should be secondary. Twist endings are just a gimmick anyway. If the film doesn't suck you in and keep you on edge, no amount of classified information is going to be worth the wait. This director is a master of tension and tone. 'The Village' has no tension and it's tone-deaf.
But it's got lots of fascism. If Shyamalan is striving to mirror the current political climate, he might be onto something. The whites-only village represents America, William Hurt's character is Dubya Bush, his fellow village elders are the Bush cabinet, and the meanie woods creatures are the heathen terrorists. When the gauntlet of violence has been thrown down, the citizens panic and hysteria sets in. The weeks following 9/11 offered a chance for a kind of New World Order that Bush Senior once talked about, but bad leadership screwed it all up. The first half of 'The Village' stumbles here & there, but its opportunity for better things is also wasted by poor leadership.
Enough about what the movie might mean in our real world. A benign group of Old World Americans have settled in a valley entirely surrounded by woods. Those We Don't Speak Of (hereafter called TWeDSO...rhymes with Drew Bledsoe) live in the bush and they'll keep the peace if the humans don't stray into past the treeline. One, then another foolish villager ventures past the danger marker and it seems that all hell is about to break loose. Meanwhile, Hurt's blind daughter, Ivy (played with pluck by Bryce Dallas Howard), has fallen for the strange Lucius Hunt. Adrien Brody is Noah, a mentally challenged irritation who is friends (maybe more) with Ivy. Halfway through the film, all those characters collide with human problems that have nothing to do with anything beyond the sinister boundaries. Somebody has to go for help through the treacherous forest and link up with the dreaded outside world.
And that's where the fascism comes into play. I wouldn't call a shark a fascist for eating stupid swimmers who get in the way, but TWeDSO aren't as clear-cut as a shark. So the reason the villagers can't leave their humble surroundings is more or less about Nazi control. They're terrified for all the wrong reasons. At least that aforementioned shark is honest. What happens in this movie is anything but honest. Judging by the final scene, if you think the characters have changed, you're looking harder than I did. Try as it might, the film is not even an inspiring message of facing your fear even when that's all you have to fear (right, FDR?).
Howard (Ron's daughter) is a natural in her first substantial role. She truly is the heart of these people---although she's given a little TOO much independence for someone who can't see---and the actress hits the right buttons. Hurt keeps giving us tiny variations on the well-worn man-in-charge persona. he's been playing for too many years now. He's a go-to actor if you want somebody to talk rationally while hardly acting rational. And Phoenix, skilled and intense as he can be in better projects, is pretty much a high-priced decoy.
Despite playing the same character as Leo DiCaprio in 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape', Brody isn't half as good...and that's AFTER he actually gets to play some different shades of mental deficiency. Maybe he and Phoenix should have switched roles because neither man was able to create a genuine character out of what the limited material they have to work with. The IMDb says Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson were in this movie. Oh, yes, they WERE. I just forgot about them, as did the director. There's nothing wrong with a young actress like Howard getting the bulk of the screen time, but the veteran actors rank as some of the most dependable ones working today. In this, all they do is dress up in their pseudo-Amish outfits, talk like they were born 100 years ago, and look worried.
Why would actors let themselves look like such fools? Box office, baby. Shyamalan's movies have been huge hits (even 'Unbreakable' was profitable) and what actor doesn't want to rake in the dollars while working with a filmmaker who's been compared to Hitchcock? They'd probably do just about anything to be this guy's plaything. While the movie is bound to win the weekend, I don't think it's going to turn into the phenomenon the studio expects. For one thing, people want a reprise of what Night has done before...and this isn't even close.
So Shyamalan has now riffed on ghosts, comics, aliens, and fairy tales. I'm supposing that's what he was aiming for here---a fairy tale. Why else is so much of the language so cheesy unless the subtext is simply a story meant to frighten children at bedtime? Hurt's character is a teacher and he seems to want everybody to sound like Massachusetts pilgrims. [Okay, now I'm convincing myself they are Amish, even though I know they're not.] Wouldn't smart people come up with some kind of actual name for creatures that have scared the living beejesus out of them? Really, "Those We Don't Speak Of"? Come on, Shyamalan, even fairy tales are allowed to be creative. Had they actually called these marauders "TWeDSO, rhymes with Bledsoe" as I have, that might have been cool.
It's TWeDSO who needed more attention too; not how they're written, but how they're visually presented. I loved 'Signs', but when we finally see the aliens, they simply aren't worth the build-up. Wisely, Shyamalan kept them out of our sight for most of the picture. As I suggested, maybe he's just too big now for somebody to have the courage to say, "The creatures aren't convincing. In fact, they look stupid, Night. They're not scary at all. Start over." If the bad guys in 'The Village' are the Big Bad Wolf to Howard's Little Yellow Riding Hood, they need to be more menacing. Otherwise, flash-frame glimpses would have been far more effective.
The movie just sort of crawwwwls to an ending. Once the Blair Witch plunge has been taken, the movie limps slowly along to its inevitable climactic confrontation in the woods. Life lessons might have been learned by one or two villagers, but the rest don't seem to get it. Whether or not they'll all stay living in this village with the same stifling rules is up to them---"them" being the elders. Everybody else is under martial law. They can't come and go as free people until the perfect-world, power-mad controllers say so. Shyamalan's "Yes" men are everywhere. They're even populating this movie.
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