The Village from The Woods

Shyamalan's Folly; My First Review
by M.A. Fedeli

Author's note: This review was written in 2004.

There are a few obvious rules that aid making a good film, but there are a gaggle of rules for making a bad film. That said, it seems M. Night Shyamalan has followed those geese closely in making his period/love story/murder mystery/monster movie/psycho-political thriller/pro-communist fable, The Village. The fact that Night did not appear to have much of a clue about exactly what kind of movie he was trying to make is The Village’s greatest weakness. The film changes gears more than a ten-speed as it unfolds. This is fine at first, as it moves from a slow-paced period (or should I say, costume) mystery into a taut and engaging thriller, housing some of the most visually imaginative, minimalist monsters ever brought to film. But as it progresses into its third and fourth acts the film falls apart and spirals into a tangle of absurdity.

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The village in The Village is inhabited by those who are elders and those who are not. The time period is the 1890’s, which we learn because of a tombstone during the opening scene: a funeral for a child. The impetus for the early action in the film is this funeral and Lucius’ (Jaquin Phoenix) frustrated urge to venture outside the village and into the dreaded “towns” to find new medicines and cures for the village residents. “The Towns” are awfully violent and decadent places though, so Lucius is quickly forbidden and discouraged by the group of elders (G8 anyone?). You see, our movie village is frozen in time (though time does not usually seem to heed to these demands) and operates with Amish sensibilities; modern medicine and the advancements of the outside world represented by “the towns” have no place.

Oh, apparently the woods surrounding the village are inhabited by horrible, blood thirsty monsters, or as they are affectionately called, “those we don’t speak of.” They must be “those we’ve never seen” as well because there is no explanation in the film for how “those who are not elders” contracted their terrible fears since we seem to have dropped in on the only time any of this has ever become an issue. There seems to be a well-established pattern of behavior for events that have never happened before. However, in the film’s first political statement, it does seem as though the elders have spun the yarn about the ferocity of the monsters well enough to effectively freak out everyone in the village. So I guess that’s good enough. Folks, this is the film, and it’s a darn good premise, I’ll admit that. Perfect territory for Shyamalan, or so we thought.

The tone of the first two acts is slow moving, re-creating for the audience the pace of life in this quiet village. Whether or not the acting is solid or the dialogue is truthful is irrelevant. We know we are at a monster movie but for the first time since Jaws we have no idea what to expect and when to expect it. Instead of being distracted by naked teens, toilet humor, or standard psychological thriller fare, we are lulled to sleep, left uniquely unprepared for the shocks and thrills to come. This is Shyamalan’s Bergman impression, it works well and it is a very good idea for a suspense film. This is the kind of filmmaking I love; when the director lets you experience the movie, not just be entertained by it. It hearkens back to the silent era when you could not rely on words. That seems almost paradoxical, being as a lack of words would naturally seem to cause a need for and a rise in action, but not really. The ensuing action must be slower and more telling, as it takes more time to describe and display a dramatic scene in silence as opposed to just quickly stating and explaining it.

The film starts to fall apart before we even realize it. This unwinding is embodied by Adrien Brody’s very visible character, Noah Percy. This is undoubtedly the most uninspired mentally handicapped performance since Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry. (How do you determine a thing like that? Brody was not nominated for an Oscar, so you know he must have screwed up bad. How hard is it to land an Oscar nomination for playing a handicapped character? They give out nominations for that kind of role when you get off the plane at LAX. Ford should be more embarrassed though, considering his film came in the Golden Years of handicapped nominations (DeNiro, Pacino, Hoffman, Day-Lewis, DiCaprio, etc.). That is, unless you subscribe to the theory that Brody had no competition, so had it much easier. You could argue for both.) The problem is, Shyamalan and Brody have no idea exactly what kind of handicap Noah is afflicted with, and it doesn’t seem like they care to know. For the ridiculous second-half of this story to work, he has to be extremely stupid and extremely cunning, extremely sweet and extremely violent all at the same time (and not in a Rainman kind of way). Brody’s character grows in importance as the story progresses and ultimately is the film’s most important character, as well as it’s most contrived and confusing.

I am going to skip over the rest of the details of the film, they are all rendered insignificant by the soon-to-come runaway plot. The last highlight of the film is the end of the second act and the first sightings of the monsters. It is Hitchcockian/Langian in its execution, and done with tact and precision to rival the best moments of horror-epic The Shining. Along with fantastically imaginative costumes, there is a perfect balance of what is shown, how much is shown, and how often it is shown. We are on our toes, eager and curious and ready for more, exactly where Shyamalan should want his audience to be.

Then comes Act 3, and Shyamalan’s insulting need to expand plots for the sole purpose of explaining it all with some shocker of total closure in the end. This is formulaic and predictable filmmaking at its worst because Shyamalan is clearly a talented man, capable of going above and beyond your typical genre pic. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe this film is his attempt to go above and beyond genre only to have his natural urges turn it all into a muddy mess. The Village would have been far better off as a genre pic, where everything is as it seems; monsters are monsters, they scare you and they eat your young and they disappear and then you have to respond somehow, hopefully in some new and interesting way. End of story.

It’s also the end of this movie. In his vain attempt to do something completely different, Shyamalan created a superfluous plotline, and wound up doing something completely absurd instead. He blows his load, which he’s worked so hard to store up, right after we see the monsters. Everything that is done by the characters from here on out is done for love, which would be excusable except for it’s not what we signed up for.

A love triangle leads to Noah stabbing Lucius. The maiden in question is Ivy, a blind lass who could play goalie for the Philadelphia Flyers if it suited the ridiculous plot. For love, she now wishes to visit “the towns” to get medicine for the dying Lucius, taking up his old cause except for her own completely selfish reasons (bring back enough for everyone, babe!). With Noah (who is amazingly aware of his actions while at the same time amazingly unaware of them) locked in the room where bad people go, Ivy petitions to the elders to let her trek through the woods. By the way, I have heard that The Woods was considered as an original title for the film. You get the feeling that the original idea for this film, before it was pilfered by Shyamalan’s crutch, had more to do with the (actual) monsters in "the woods" and less with these boring, (sometimes) contraction-free villagers. At least, it should have.

Anyway, Ivy convinces her father, William Hurt’s Edward Walker, the lead elder, to let her go to the towns. Just imagine a modern teenager trying to convince her father to let her go out on a date with Johnny, the kid from the other side of the tracks who lives in the house with no front lawn, just dirt and rocks. Anyway, this is the first loud, disappointing thud of the film! Eddie kind of lets us all in on the secret that the monsters are not real; they are just the elders in awesome costumes. Great, can we just leave the theater now? It’s at this point, with much running time to go, I realized that the film is going to be all about contrivance and not substance. Here’s why the audience should be incensed that the monsters are farce: the monster costumes they created for this film were ingenious. We deserve another film with REAL monsters that look like these. I found myself wishing we could be allowed to believe the monsters were still real because fake monsters is the worst plot resolution since, well, the one that happens in the end of this film that has us thinking that in comparison, the fake monsters bit wasn’t all that bad. I really wish any of this still mattered though, because by this point in the film the entire production only really exists to trick the audience as much as possible. This is patronizing filmmaking and unfortunately, it’s a good enough reason to make a film these days.

(I don’t have to point out how impossible it would be for Ivy to do what she does in the woods, but since I already have; the blind girl is sent on her way though the deadly woods to the equally harsh towns by her “loving” father where she does a bunch of stuff a blind person probably cannot do alone, unless she is a bat. Oh, and it only gets worse.)

The rest of this film is so obnoxiously bad that I barely feel like writing about it. Any intelligent audience will realize that many of the earlier scenes in the picture were corrupted so we could be more easily fooled. For example, conversations between elders (the supposed “all-knowing”) are intentionally made vague and misleading so we think they are talking about something else entirely. This is only done to expand the shock value of the film’s twists. No recent films have had more clear and effective twist endings than The Usual Suspects and Seven, yet rarely are any scenes in those films played unrealistic or the dialogue made vague in order to mislead the audience and hide the ending, unless the characters are choosing to mislead each other, which is different and acceptable. There’s a whole other level of clever in those two films, and it’s a level that mainstream Hollywood has been trying to emulate, unsuccessfully, ever since. As for Shyamalan, he puts way too much stock into his surprise endings and it backfires horribly in The Village.

Back to the story, for someone who probably needs constant supervision, Noah seems to wonder off unnoticed an awful lot. We are supposed to believe he skinned the animals that caused the latest uproar. Or did he? It doesn’t matter anyway. Apparently he found one of the costumes they hid under the floorboards beneath their version of a jail cell, of all places. Oh, please. Why on earth would you hide it there, where all the last people you’d want to find it hang out? The answer is you wouldn’t unless you needed your crazy character to find them so you could extend your absurdities. So what were the animal skins for if he found a costume? Don’t ask. I still don’t know if the skinned animals were intentionally left up to interpretation and the audience’s imagination, put in solely for confusion, or if Night didn’t feel like tacking another ten minutes of plot-hole-filler on to the film with a concocted story to explain it (I really don't mind some plot holes, I don't want to sit in the theater for 6 hours. They just have to be ones you can still drive over without tearing out your whole transmission).

Anyway (again), Noah manages to break out of his jail, unnoticed, and while wearing the costume, manages to find and attack Ivy in the woods (or he’s playing with her, who knows what hell he’s doing), until she kills him, never sure if he was real or her imagination because she’s blind, remember? I almost didn’t. When your plot is absolutely preposterous, the things you have to do to justify it are equally preposterous. This was the last moment of confusion in the film because for a few minutes we too didn’t know who was in the monster suit, if it actually was a real monster, or if it was her imagination. Wow, big surprise, it was Noah, he IS crazy after all! While we’re on that subject, how did the elders, who all seem to have kids, sneak so effectively in and out of the houses and village wearing these costumes? Where is the Clark Kent suspicion? You know, never in the same place at the same time. This movie falls apart under cross-examination, and for a filmmaker who tries so hard in all his films to explain the seemingly unexplainable, that is death.

Long story short, by the end we find out it’s not 1890, it’s present day, and that’s the big surprise, I guess. This ending is insulting. Why does it matter that it’s 2000 instead of 1900? As far as the characters are concerned it doesn’t matter at all (as tribute, I tried to use no contractions for this article but I am weaker than some of the acting in the film). The "towns" (cities) are still dirty, corrupt places, in 1890 and now. This is just shock for shock’s sake. This is an ending from a distracted filmmaker for an unsophisticated audience that is impressed with shiny things like big surprise endings, no matter what they are.

The entire second half of this film is not an exposition of characters and what happens to them, it is an amusement park ride for the audience. It is the biggest rule you can break; making a movie purely for the basest instincts of a dense audience. As enjoyable and suspenseful as Shyamalan’s films are, his obsession with shock endings explaining the already impossible is tired. Take The Sixth Sense, every scene with Bruce Willis and someone other than Haley Osmet has to be manipulated so WE don’t realize Willis is dead and not really interacting with anyone. Is that truthful and intelligent art, or is it just manipulative theater from clever-obsessed Hollywood? (Verbal Kint and Agent Kulluon don’t have that problem, they speak plain, realistically and bluntly, only trying to fool each other. Any attempt to trick the audience is achieved by smart, patient writing and an unflinching plot)

There are so many holes in The Village I don’t have the time or inclination to address them all, unless you have a fortnight to kill. They are not the kind of holes that are remotely clever, or that you take dramatic license with or suspend your belief/disbelief for (like Hannibal Lechter sneaking out of his maximum security holding pen with someone else’s face). They are the kind of holes that are created because the beginning of the film seemed to be written with a different ending in mind than the ultimate ending. When you love that beginning idea so much and don’t feel like changing it to adapt to your absurd ending, more holes than a Pottery Barn in Dresden is what you get. This is fiction, you have the ability to go back and do-over, to re-write and re-imagine, don’t be afraid! This may all seem very nit-picky, but the point is, the film is so lost and confused with itself that almost everything can be deconstructed. It’s like telling a lie to cover up a lie that covered up a previous lie. That feels like the process Shyamalan underwent for this film: he had an idea about a period movie with monsters in the woods and then lost control as he tried to expand the plot. In searching for his trademark gimmick he just kept building bad plot line onto bad plot line.

Noah’s character is a metaphor for this film: seems like it’s going to be one thing, but turns out to be something else completely, and then switches back and forth a few more times without rhyme or reason or rational until you just don’t care anymore. Like I said, this film lost me when it confirmed my worst pre-film fears and made the monsters fake. Isn’t that the entire film though? Wasn’t this film about a village dealing with monsters? It should have been because if it was it could have been one of the best suspense movies of modern times, it had all the perfect elements. Everyone, before going in to this film, had to think that one extremely possible, cheap, and disappointingly obvious plot twist would be for the monsters to be fakes. Shyamalan must have known this but decided to do it anyway, and thought throwing on a bunch of other unnecessary twists to distract and justify would mask the fact he had no other good ideas for where to go after the first 55 minutes. Bad decisions were made, and rarely is it so easy to point to such glaring things and know undoubtedly that they are the reasons a movie does not work.

People think this film is a political metaphor, a social statement, an interpretation of global events and paranoia. Unfortunately, it is all of those and none. Shyamalan is in over his head with all the statements he is apparently trying to make, because God knows, he definitely isn’t trying to finish telling a creative story. His attempts to be fresh and surprising all come off as tired, predictable and cliché. He cannot handle the multiple purposes, motives and plots running concurrently within this film. He is not Jean Renoir and this is not Rules of the Game. This film should have simply been about cool monsters terrorizing a village and the hopefully new and interesting ways the villagers go about solving the problem (or something even better that any of us could never think of, hence us not getting paid millions to write and direct big budget films!). Unfortunately though, subtlety and simplicity in film disappeared not long after Mr. Lucas decided to tell stories about good and evil in space. If Night could not come up with any resolutions that were as interesting as the monsters, he simply should have waited and made this later when he actually had a good idea and the ability to direct it. Oh, and it should have been called The Woods.