| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Sunday, August 04, 2002 ( 8/04/2002 06:09:00 AM ) Bill S. “THE NERDS WERE RIGHT!” – It’s a reflection of my generational blinders that when I saw the title for M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, the first thing I thought of was the 1971 hit by the Five Man Electrical Band: a lumpen/hippie protest song (from Canada!) that opens railing against human presumptuousness and concludes on a hokey evocation of deity. Now that I’ve seen Signs, I’m not sure the writer-director wasn’t thinking of that lumbering pop hit: his movie ends on the same note of unconvincing spiritual elevation Signs is a middling scary summer film about a family stranded out in an isolated farmhouse in the midst of what could be a world-wide alien invasion. A solemnly paced melding of the best of early Spielberg with the worst of later-day George Romero, the flick aims to provoke chills as it simultaneously builds to an affirmation of God’s Mysterious Ways. That second thematic impulse winds up totally deadening the first: once we realize the writer-director is leading angst-ridden protagonist Mel Gibson to a renewal of his faith, the frights are sucked out of the film. (What gave flicks like the original Night of the Living Dead their nihilistic charge was the realization that, as Joe Bob Briggs once noted, “Anyone can die” – and to hell with Deeper Themes!) Still, for the first hour, I bought the set-bound pic: as former man-of-the-cloth-turned-farmer Gibson and dunderhead younger bro Joaquin Phoenix fend off unseen, possibly alien forces; as our hero’s two Spielbergian children (Rory Culkin and the very Drew-like Abigail Breslin) provide both the voice of innocence and the inevitable kid-in-peril scene; as the director makes maximum use of a night-shrouded cornfield – I was willin’ to go along with things (even if Gibson does emerge from a dash through the cornfield totally unscratched). I have no belief in the reality of crop circles, but then I don’t believe in flesh-eating zombies either. All I ask of my movies is that they make me believe for the space of a couple hours. And aside from some clunky phony TV footage designed to show us what’s going on the world outside the farmhouse (Romero did it better in 1968 with a few local Baltimore teevee personalities), the movie does successfully argue its pop sci premise. There are some funny scenes in the film revolving around the hokum that’s been written about crop circles and UFOs, including a laugh-out-loud moment involving tin-foil hats. But director’s trademark show-little/suggest-a-lot style of filmmaking feels needlessly constrictive by the second half of the film. We need to see whatever is responsible for all the unexplainable events in the film, and when we finally do, the reaction is more aw, c’mon! than goshwow. As a scriptwriter Shyalaman has an enviable ability to parcel out information that only makes sense when you think about things later – a scene where Gibson’s “Father” refuses to call the vet when one of the family dogs starts acting odd only makes sense once we realize that he holds the local vet responsible for the death of his wife – and he’s also grown better at adding lighter moments into his whispery world. But aside from Sixth Sense (the ending of which rested on what the writer was holding back from us and his protagonist), the man just hasn’t come up with a good way to finish his films. The mechanical climax of Signs rests on a series of contrivances that say nothing about the Unseen Hand of God – and everything about the Leaden Hand of the Writer. I had an okay time at Signs, though a part of me can't help wondering if its writer-director hasn't set himself on a sped-up version of the John Carpenter Career Trajectory. (Caught a piece of The Fog on cable the other day – and you can see elements of that flawed film here, too.) But if that's the case, where's his Adrienne Barbeau? # | |
|
|
