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CORRIDOR of HORROR |
DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 2, No. 2 |
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Shyamalan & Willis prove magic
can strike twice in Hollywood
By
JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
"Unbreakable" is the movie that finally shattered my
cynical belief that Hollywood has, with the coming of the new
millennium, shriveled up impotently when it comes to making original,
groundbreaking movies. In recent years movies, at least 99.99
per cent of them, have become clones--blatant copies of that
which washed down well once, but which causes belches and more
horrible forms of backwash the second time around. And in extreme
cases, bubbly, gut-gripping cholic.
Writer-producer-director M. Night Shyamalan proved he knew how to put a cornerstone in place, to help support a lost industry, with last year's "The Sixth Sense," a film that defied usual story-telling conventions and probed one of our world's enigmas, the realm of the supernatural.
Enigmas, in fact, seem to fascinate Shyamalan. Enigmas about the world around us and ultimately life itself. He has a way of making a cosmic issue out of a commonplace-looking situation, with ordinary men and people plodding along through life unaware of their greatest importance.
You may not believe this, but "Unbreakable" is about the universe of comic books. And collectors. But not in the way you might think. The comic-book reader is an individual, the director tells us in an opening title card, who collects an average of 3,102 comic books during his lifetime. (I'm a comic-collector myself, though I've collected a few more issues than that and maybe that helped me a little to relate to this movie so strongly.)
As with "Sixth Sense" it's difficult to describe "Unbreakable" without giving away too much, but do let me say that it is about superheroes and supervillains and the cosmic battles they fight. But, alas, you are not going to see any of the usual comic-book superheroic imagery here. No "X-Men" types or "Holy Bats, Batman" type of dialogue.
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With "Unbreakable" Shymalan deals with human frailties and superstrengths, and why one of us can be a hero at the same time another can be a dastardly rat villain . . . with the added suggestion that there's a God-driven universe around us that has preordained these distinct and individual and necessary destinies.
Powerful stuff, and Shyamalan is a powerful film-maker who knows how to depict these forces by using indirection, deception and clever trickery of story telling. As with "Sixth Sense," we are not quite seeing what we think we are seeing; those cosmic forces are forever circling around just outside the range of Shyamalan's camera. In fact, Shyamalan has a habit of pointing his camera away from the central image, so that we see it out of harmonious balance with the rest of the scenery. As it should be, for his characters are often out of balance, lost, fumbling to find the truth or what it's all supposed to be about.
Shyamalan, in both "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable," assumes a subjective viewpoint about a single character, though he gives us very little exposition in setting these characters up. His everyman has become Bruce Willis, a brooding, pensive, dark-sided individual who, under Shyamalan's consistent direction, conveys a sense of unhappiness and overwhelming ennui about his existence.
As David Dunn, Willis portrays a sports-stadium security guard who is the sole survivor of a major train crash outside Philadelphia. Unhappily married to college sweetheart Robin Wright Penn, Dunn now sleeps in a separate bedroom and communicates better with son Spencer Treat Clark. Hard to tell more without giving away too much.
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Shyamalan's second everyman in "Unbreakable" is the opposite of the title character. He is a driven comic-art collector and seller named Elijah Price, who is played by Samuel L. Jackson with unusual intensity. This is one of Jackson's most enigmatic roles--a man who was born with a fragile-bone disease and has suffered hundreds of broken bones during his lifetime, and who has spent his days either in a hospital bed or studying and collecting comic-book superhero artwork.
We know only what David Dunn (Willis' character in "Unbreakable") learns as the movie unfolds, and what little pieces of exposition that finally come to us, almost spoon-fed, a dose at a time if you will, from Shyamalan's screenplay. It is the triple-threat's way of controlling and manipulating us from the beginning. He creates a mysterious planet Earth that is exclusively his terra though there is little that is firm about it. His is a world of fragility, and breakable things.
Some critics have called "Unbreakable" too ponderous, too ethereal and too unsatisfying in its resolution. But I ask: Do movies always have to be explosive and fast-paced and explicit? Willis made one of those himself, "Armageddon," saving the world in the final frames, so why can't we have a different kind of Willis, one far more complex and interesting? I ask you, what's wrong with a movie that spends more time trying to intrigue and puzzle you, rather than lambaste you with pyrotechnics and blood-and-guts visuals?
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For Willis, these two films have set him on a new career pathway that finally do him justice. In his debut days as David Addison, that cocky wise-cracking private eye on TV's "Moonlighting," he displayed a capacity and capability for comedy that made me think he was going to forge a career in screen comedies.
Instead came "Die Hard" and its sequels and then such awful action stuff as "Hudson Hawk," "Last Man Standing," "Color of Night" and "The Last Boy Scout." Willis seemed to be all over the genres, and with "Armageddon" seemed to have nowhere left to go. How do you follow up saving the world? He ultimately chose "Sixth Sense" and he chose wisely.
I just hope "Unbreakable" leads to more dramatic roles that tap his strong screen presence. He's finally developing the stuff that's gonna make him a terrific actor one day.
©
2000 by John Stanley.
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