Flak Magazine: Review of Signs, 8-7-02

The Godfather. The Exorcist. Jaws. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Silence of the Lambs. Rocky. Dead Poet's Society. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Star Wars. Psycho.

On its face, that list of movies is basically only interesting in its noninterestingness — yup, sure enough, those movies are, on average, pretty good, but they're not pretty good in any uniform, interrelated way, nor are they unheralded whatsoever. In fact, trying to imagine the specific criteria that might generate such a list is a difficult exercise — perhaps the best movies among the Top 100 all-time box office champs? Among Best Picture nominees since 1960? A closer guess might be the upper echelon of the AFI Top 100 had it been truer to its pandering nature, dropping such critical chestnuts as Citizen Kane and Singin' in the Rain in favor of movies more beloved by Joe Multiplex.

But that list is interesting — not only interesting, but fascinating — because it details M. Night Shyamalan's favorite movies, as reported by Newsweek in a sidebar to their cover story positing him as "the next Spielberg." It's hard to imagine another director whose work has been nominated for Best Picture (as Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense was in 1999) proffering such, frankly, lowbrow love; even George Lucas has Akira Kurosawa fanaticism to give him film geek cred. Shyamalan's list spans 31 years, but his picks are clustered around the mid- to late-'70s. Consider that he was born in 1970 and that he said 2001 was "probably the worst year for movies for me since I've been alive" (strong words considering the year had many big and small treasures), and you get a familiar sense of post-Boomer self-regard: The best movies ever were popular films made during his lifetime, except, you know, for those movies being made today.

What you get from this list is a sense of Shyamalan's genuineness: He only lists movies that he viscerally loves — fun movies plus the occasional hip downer like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There's no pretense of pretense, of nutritional value for its own sake; Shyamalan slips great movies into his list, but only if they're also great entertainments. (This may also account for his flip blurbs; surely, having devoted so much of the issue to Shyamalan, the Newsweek folks would have let him give longer blurbs than "Most inspiring film I've ever seen" for Rocky or "Best dramatic film ever made" for Cuckoo's; then again, longer write-ups might suggest that movies are worth thinking about instead of just experiencing, and someone with that attitude probably wouldn't have picked those favorites.) Other directors would slip some offbeat, not-available-at-Blockbuster titles onto their list, for a maybe-real, maybe-constructed sense of erudition and refinement. Which is why a possible motive for the list might be faux genuineness: Maybe the NYU-educated Shyamalan wants to come off to Newsweek readers as the opposite of erudite and refined, just a good ol' boy makin' good ol' blockbusters.

And so we get Signs, a meta-"War of the Worlds" that's a story of both the invasion and the public's reaction to news of the invasion — imagine Orson Welles making his famous broadcast on CNN. Farmer and ex-priest Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) finds a crop circle in his corn, and then innumerable accounts of crop circles make the news, and then photojournalists capture what sure look like spaceships above Mexico, etc., etc. But where most movies in this ilk turn to globetrotting to show you the breadth of the issue, Signs keeps it down home. The family — Graham, his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and his children Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin) — only leave the farm once, for a brief foray into town, after which point the setting of the movie gets smaller and smaller, from the farm to the house to first floor to the basement to the basement in the dark … .

This may not sound like much of an alien invasion movie, and that's because it's not much of an alien invasion movie. In a signature Shyamalan move, the writer/director keeps his subtext so close to the surface you can barely call it subtext. The movie's about family and faith, and the ever-diminishing setting only amplifies the family's interreliance. Aliens? Shmaliens.

Shyamalan is interested in a different kind of extraterrestrial — and if you can't predict what change of heart might befall a former man of the cloth, then count this paragraph as being spoilered and skip to the next. Graham's rejected the church, exemplified in a moving bit about the difference between people who believe in a divine plan and those who accept the arbitrariness of the universe. Just how arbitrary it turns out to be provides the movie's expected "shock" ending, a development that gives the moviegoer food for thought. It's no revelation that stories are designed to put their protagonist through the wringer, with the power of the story coming from how that protagonist reacts to being wrung. Given the extreme circumstances that precipitate drama (as well as those that allow it to be handily tucked away at the story's end), the idea of deus ex machina — God as machine, manipulating story events — is more common than the typical, frowned-upon examples of, say, a car engine not turning over when the villain is bearing down on our hero. The storyteller serves as the god of the narrative; Signs, like this year's The Mothman Prophecies, puts a supernatural intermediary on the scene, a nebulous entity whose ultimate intent is to teach the protagonist a lesson — to make the story work. In Mothman, it seemed like a clever commentary on filmmaking; in Signs, it feels like proselytizing.

Shyamalan's interest in matters of faith is less straightforward than it might seem; Shyamalan is an Episcopal-school-educated Hindu. And so while Signs comes across as evangelism, it's devoutly ecumenical. Though that may seem like a curious mix (if not an uncommon one in Hollywood), consider it in relation to his top 10 list. In reality, those things are brothers, the offspring of a man so eager to please that he readily lapses into pandering.

The pandering warps Signs in two ways that are really the same: He needs to trust the audience better and to trust himself better, two storytelling fundamentals that perpetuate one another. The commercial indifference to Unbreakable fouled Shyamalan's self-reliance; he considers that movie "picture-perfect, down to the scene," and it's certainly nearer than Signs. Unbreakable showed considerable assurance; Signs is abundantly spooky, but very rarely transcendent. For instance: The idea of "Chekhov's gun" comes from the playwright's maxim that a rifle hanging from the wall in the first act must be fired during the third act. Taking that idea and running with it, Shyamalan turns the farmhouse into Chekhov's general store: We get Chekhov's baseball bat, Chekhov's poison, Chekhov's albuterol, Chekhov's glassware … . While this ties neatly into the film's coincidence-or-is-it intentions, the referents aren't acts apart from their resolutions; sometimes, they're five minutes away, which is shoddy construction and hints at distrust of the audience's ability to keep things straight. Similarly, the director uses a double flashback to cement his climax, when a single flashback would have been much better. Surely his instincts tell him the double flashback is clunky; perhaps he thinks that a viewing public who didn't "get" Unbreakable needs to be condescended to, and so he spells everything out — the movie's final shot is like having the punchline of a knock-knock joke explained to you. He even writes himself an apologetic, cover-your-ass role about which he wonders aloud, "You don't think people are going to get on me for that, do you?"

But none of this makes Signs unbearable; in terms of nail-biting, it's first rate, and it's handsomely acted by a lovingly chosen cast. Shyamalan just has so much craft that it feels like he's pulling his punches, hindered from achieving art by his unwillingness to go for broke. Hopefully, he'll find the success of Signs to be a liberation, not a reinforcement of his more mediocre tendencies.

(PS: While the movie finds a somewhat more elegant way to turn back its invaders than did War of the Worlds, it's a permutation that's at least as old as the Transformers comic book from the '80s. Don't click through if you don't want a spoiler.)

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)