The Village Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)August 4th, 2004
The Village (2004): *1/2 out of ****
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt, Jaoquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, Brendan Gleeson, Judy Greer and Sigourney Weaver.
NOTE: I've found it impossible to review this film without revealing its secrets. It may be best to put this aside until after you've seen it, but if you ask me, I think you're better off spending your money on something else.
"The Village" is a huge miscalculation on the part of its writer-director, M. Night Shyamalan. It sets up several staples of a horror film, and then undermines it all to make a simplistic commentary on the idea of a horror film instead. William Hurt plays the hub of a community that resides in an isolated
rural village in what seems to be the 19th century. He and other village elders speak of large, bestial creatures that live in the surrounding forest: "...we do not enter their woods, and they do not enter our village." I can tell you this: it angers me to write the film's setup knowing now everything that happens. Anyway, the village contains an array of characters engaged in a
variety of familial conflicts and love triangles, all while ominous music plays
on the soundtrack and rumbling noises are heard coming from the woods. Given the implied danger of living in such proximity to the creatures, you'd think that the logical thing to do would be to move someplace else, but therein lies the movie's secret.
Shyamalan is his own worst enemy. He's a very talented director but usually a derivative author. "The Sixth Sense" had a more convoluted take on the conflict in "Jacob's Ladder," and his "Signs" was an alloy of "Close Encounters" and "Night of the Living Dead," though both films created a measure
of suspense. For so long he has enflamed the collective mind of his audience with impending surprises that this time around, you don't partake in any kind of suspense, but simply wait for it to end so the surprise can be revealed, "our little share in some pop-culture currency," as a co-worker of mine put it.
In a way, "The Village" reminded me of my old grade school field trips to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Detroit. The film's cast could easily inhabit that village, and the acting is straight out of a tourist attraction, or a bad high-school play ("...peas and carrots, carrots and peas..."). Shyamalan's period dialogue is so stilled and strangled and obviously written that the actors choke on it, and deliver dreary, wooden performances (Sigourney Weaver has the audiences' line when she exclaims: "What
nonsense are you saying?"). It's not pretty. Adrien Brody is embarrassing as the local idiot, looking like Tom Kinney of "Mr. Show" in a bad wig and a fit of zaniness -why are moviegoers routinely so impressed by adults acting like mental five-year-olds? Jaoquin Phoenix's speech patterns are about as anachronistic as Keanu Reeves' were in Coppola's "Dracula." The biggest wastes
are Brendan Gleeson and Weaver, two of the best actors we have from either side
of the pond, and they're reduced to insignificant roles with nothing to do. The only performance to garner any depth is by Bryce Dallas Howard, even though
she will occasionally go back and forth between blindness and partial blindness
throughout the movie. All of the extras "make merriment" and find things "most
agreeable" as if teleported from a Louisa May Alcott novel, complete with petticoats and wicker brooms.
And the twist? It's nothing new. Anyone who has ever watched more than a few episodes of "The Twilight Zone" will see it coming. And what is Shyamalan trying to say? That superstition is more powerful than common sense? File under "Well duh." He also apparently wants to use the story to showcase the themes of the "white flight" or the "culture of fear." Speaking of which, if one buys into the conceit that no one has ever entered or left the village, a number of logical rifts open up: How did the villagers avoid incest, or stay literate? How did they make clothing or build their houses? Did they heat up their own sand to create glass for the windows? Wouldn't anyone...*anyone,* even *once,* grow tired of life in such a small and secluded place or wonder about life beyond the village? You see where I'm going with this. When you first see one of the beasts, it's wearing a *man-made* cowl, and you never see more than one in a single frame.
The horror genre can work wonders when it taps into a few tactile things you're
afraid of, in this case, that feeling of being followed by someone or something, noises heard in the dark and nocturnal excursions into the woods. The arc of "The Village" involves not creatures in the forest or why they're there, but the suggestion of them. In the end you are left with a horror story
without the horror, feeling like a con man has just pulled a fast one on you. It's one thing for a movie to have a MacGuffin, and quite another to make the entire movie the MacGuffin. It's a bait-and-switch, a shaggy-dog story, an emperor without clothes.
Andy Keast
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
