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August 16, 2004

The Village

As I get ready to head south again after a very pleasant weekend at home, I thought I'd post a few thoughts about the last film Amanda and I watched this weekend: M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village."

I should note up front that I am a big fan of Shyamalan. I felt that "The Sixth Sense" deserved the Best Picture nod back in 1999, and while "Unbreakable" and "Signs" were not in "The Sixth Sense"'s league, they were both pretty entertaining films as well. So I went into "The Village" predisposed to expect a good film, and I was not disappointed.

The film shows us a small village in late-19th century America, precisely where is never determined, where the villagers live in an uneasy truce with some kind of creatures who inhabit the woods surrounding the village. After the death of a young boy to illness, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) offers to make the dangerous journey through the woods to the towns to bring back medicine. The town elders, led by Edward Walker (William Hurt) and Lucius' mother, Alice (Sigourney Weaver), turn him down. Meanwhile, it appears that the truce between the villagers and the creatures in the woods is breaking down, as animals are found dead and skinned and the creatures actually begin walking into the town, marking some of the houses. The situation deteriorates to the point where Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), Edward's blind daughter, must go to the towns to retrieve now desperately-needed medicine.

Shyamalan has always been a master of suspense, and "The Village" is no exception. One scene actually nearly got me out of my seat in the theater, it is so unexpected. The tension builds quietly until the viewer, even though he knows bad things are going to happen, is in no way prepared for what Shyamalan is going to spring on him. But what makes "The Village" really good is that it isn't really a horror picture at all, but a character study that asks some really hard questions and leaves it to the audience to try and answer them. Whatever Shyamalan thinks of the questions, he doesn't steer the audience one way or the other, and you will walk out of "The Village" with a lot more to think about that simply the thrills.

"The Village" offers a thrill ride alongside a sad but true fact of life: as Trotsky once observed, you may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you. Likewise, no matter how hard you may try to shut out the world outside, it only works as long as the world outside agrees to it. And that is never very long.