November 23–30, 2000

movie shorts

Unbreakable

Here we go again.

The Sixth Sense was not a movie that people were content to like. Or love. It was the kind of movie that turned people into evangelists, spreading the good word to whoever would listen, and heaping scorn on those who would not. It was a movie that touched people deeply enough they felt compelled to share, yet with flaws deep enough that they reacted violently to any attempt to criticize it, as if they knew how precarious their enjoyment was.

I’m reasonably certain this was the case in other cities, but I know for sure that it was so in Philadelphia, where writer/director M. Night Shyamalan was practically coronated for filming the first Philadelphia-shot bona fide blockbuster since Rocky. Disliking The Sixth Sense was akin to hating Christmas, and downright unPhiladelphian, to boot. How could you hate a homegrown success story, let alone one who pledged to keep living and working out of the Philadelphia area, one who gave local folks jobs and brought Bruce Willis to town on a regular basis?

Well, you could, and I did. For all I know, M. Night Shyamalan gives toys to orphans and treats neighborhood puppy dogs to heaping plates of rare roast beef, but as a filmmaker, his talents are modest at best, and have more to do with commercialism than (forgive the term) art. They include a knack for sentimentality, an even-handed (if lead-footed) sense of pace and a skill for stretching out a handful of themes over the length of an entire movie. Enough people were taken in by The Sixth Sense’s vapid nostrums (your loved ones are not dead, but hanging around waiting for a chance to talk to you) that they overlooked the fact that the film never developed beyond that basic theme. After a twist ending that left folks too dazzled to remember anything else, they left the theater convinced they’d seen a film that built to an inevitable conclusion, rather than one that merely dropped stray hints along the way.

But enough with the history lessons. The subject of the day is Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s fourth film, which arrives in theaters positioned as a holiday hit-in-the-making. Bruce Willis returns, as does the city of Philadelphia, filmed once again as if the stores in town only stock 40-watt bulbs. This time out, Shyamalan isn’t a young unknown: He’s the writer/ director of The Sixth Sense, and expectations are raised accordingly. So how do the films stack up against each other? Well, it’s better than The Sixth Sense, at least.

Willis plays David Dunn, a security guard with a failing marriage who under the opening credits awkwardly removes his wedding ring to flirt awkwardly with a pretty young woman on the train. He fails, but before long he’s got bigger problems on his hands. As he looks out the window, the train begins to shake, first gently, then violently, and after the screen bleeds to white, we cut to a news report of a catastrophic train crash, from which David emerges as the sole survivor. Not only that, but while those around him were mangled and burned beyond recognition, he’s essentially unharmed. As he walks out of the emergency room, his wife and child (Robin Wright Penn and Spencer Treat Clark) run to meet him, while the camera catches the faces of grieving families all around him.

At the funeral for the crash’s victims, David receives a mysterious note — "When was the last time you were sick?" — which leads him to Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic-book-art dealer with a congenital bone disease which makes him extremely prone to injury. As breakable as he is, Elijah, his brain saturated with comic-book dualism, has conceived the idea that the world must contain his exact opposite, a near-invulnerable man who’s the real-life analogue to the four-color heroes on the walls of his gallery. A man like this, he reasons, would not come into existence by accident, but would be destined to safeguard his fellow humans. While David’s job working security at college football games clearly seems like a dead end to him, Elijah sees it as a sign of his true purpose: Eyes ablaze, he asks, "Do you think it’s any accident you chose the field of protection?"

David, of course, thinks this is nuts, but slowly (and I do mean slowly) the pieces begin to fall together. Why hasn’t he ever been sick? How does he know who in a crowd to check for weapons? His marriage is almost over and his accomplishments are few, but what if that’s just because he’s never realized his true purpose?

Like the central conceit of The Sixth Sense, this is an essentially bogus concept, one that leads us away from reality rather than to it. There are no superheroes, dead people are just dead, and while pretending otherwise may be attractive, it’s ultimately destructive. It’s one thing to construct a fantasy world where such things might be true, and it’s another to film them as if they happened in the real world. I’d argue that there’s more truth in Batman than there is in Unbreakable, because the former prescribes comic-book justice for a comic-book world, while Unbreakable— despite Elijah’s disclaimer that "real life doesn’t always fit into neat little boxes that are drawn for it" — tries to cram reality into a nine-panel page.

Why is it, I wonder, that makers of comic-book-ish movies are so polarized, so driven either to candy-colored escapism or brooding, noir realism, to Dick Tracy on one hand or 8mm on the other? (The dramatically inert X-Men might have been after the right blend of real-life problems and fantastical conflict, but it couldn’t manage to make its characters human and superhuman at the same time.) Unbreakable seems to me on the right track with Elijah, giving Jackson wild, asymmetrical hair and a wardrobe that might have been borrowed from Prince, but Willis can’t (or isn’t allowed to) supply the down-to-earth wisecracks that would undercut Jackson’s manic obsession. When Elijah calls David up convinced he’s found his weakness, his "kryptonite," David merely stares at the answering machine, when something as simple as a drawling "Yeah, right" would have brought some much-needed levity. Willis has a certain punch-in-the-arm charisma, but when he’s called upon to play stoic, he’s dead on screen.

We can be thankful, at least, that Shyamalan doesn’t succumb to the lure of over-stylization. Most of Unbreakable is shot in sensible master shots, which while hardly groundbreaking is a welcome change of pace from the cut-cut-cut style we so regularly have forced down our throats. If only Shyamalan trusted his words as much as he trusts his images. Like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable is written in a self-impressed style which never hesitates to underline a point twice when once will do: If you had a nickel for every time Sam Jackson mouths the word "comics," you could practically pay Shyamalan’s reported $20-million salary. And despite the film’s leisurely pace, some scenes still feel rushed. (The press notes say Shyamalan had another script ready to go after The Sixth Sense, but decided it wasn’t the proper follow-up and hastily banged out Unbreakable instead.) One cynically manufactured confrontation finds David’s son training a gun on his father to see if he can withstand bullets; the drama is so arbitrary, so brazenly manipulative as to be offensive. You can practically hear Shyamalan whispering in your ear: "Remember how you cried at that kid in The Sixth Sense? Do it again."

Of course, Unbreakable comes with its own twist ending, although this one comes with what look like the marks of test-screening jitters. (And no, I won’t give it away, so quit your bitching.) An ambiguous but sensible conclusion is followed by Dragnet-style titles that tell you what really happened, an unforgivable cop-out in a fiction film. It’s a shame the studio, or Shyamalan, lost their nerve; you want to see a movie carried through on its own terms, whatever they might be. If Unbreakable isn’t a shining ray of hope, it’s at least a modest improvement over its predecessor, and you can only hope that improvement will be allowed to continue unhindered.