Eclecticism

A few weeks ago, Prairie and I went out to see M. Night Shyamalan‘s latest, The Village. I’ve been holding off on writing about it for a bit, as I wanted to let it rumble around in my head for a bit — I knew what my first impression was, but as I’ve had something of an on-again, off-again opinion of Shyamalan’s films, I didn’t want to rush into a review fresh after seeing the film.

(Honestly, I don’t know how professional film reviewers do it. When I go into a film for the first time, I tend to turn my brain off, letting myself sink into the world the film creates, not bothering to pick it apart or watch for inconsistencies. Most of the time, this works pretty well, and I thoroughly enjoy myself while watching the movie — and, as a consequence, I’ve come out of some royal stinkers thinking that they were pretty darn fun right off the bat. Once I’ve had a few hours or days to actually process what I’d watched, I’ll start re-evaluating on a more critical level. But right after that first viewing? It’s probably not best to trust my first impressions…)

However, after turning it over in my head for a while, and discussing it with Prairie and her sister this weekend, I’m pretty sure that I can stand by my first impression — The Village is by far my favorite of Shyamalan’s films.

Probably the primary thing that Shyamalan has become famous for is the “twist” in his films — the final revelation that either helps to explain what’s been happening in the film (The Sixth Sense) or simply wraps everything up in a less-than-expected manner (Signs) — Unbreakable fell somewhere in between, from what I remember.

The strength of The Village is that unlike his prior films, where the story sometimes seemed to exist solely as an excuse to get to the final revelation, it instead focuses far more on the situations and interactions of the characters in the body of the film. When the film’s “secret” is finally revealed, I wasn’t surprised in the least — I had been fairly sure of the gimmick for a good portion of the movie by this point — but in a pleasant contrast to his earlier films, this didn’t lessen my appreciation of the film at all. Where the prior films in Shyamalan’s oeuvre all walked us step-by-step to the inevitable (in retrospect) ending, The Village could have existed quite well as a character study if the gimmick was known beforehand.

As the movie’s been out for a while, I’m going to go ahead and continue rambling — if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to avoid the rest of this post. Here, of course, the gimmick is that what’s been presented as a mid-1800’s Quaker-ish society is in actuality a modern community, living an isolated existence on a private sanctuary, presented to the outside world as a wildlife preserve. Only the village elders know of the outside modern world, and they use a combination of boogyman stories and frightening costumes to keep the younger members of the community from straying into the woods and discovering the world outside the sanctuary’s walls.

As I mentioned earlier, the final revelation wasn’t a surprise for me at all. I’d had an odd feeling throughout the film that there was something “off” about the community, and I’d become fairly certain that we weren’t actually dealing with the pre-technological world that was being presented to us. Prairie and I spent some time discussing what it was that tipped us off, and we both think that it was the use of language that did it. All of the dialogue felt a little stilted, especially when any of the village elders were speaking, as if there was a little too much conscious thought behind their conversation — as if they weren’t entirely comfortable speaking as they were (slightly odd phrasing, and a very noticeable lack of any contractions at all).

To some, this may have come off as stiff acting, and I really can’t argue with that conclusion at all. However, it’s my feeling that it wasn’t the actors who were stiff, but that it was the characters — that one of the decisions made when the community was first established was to revert to a perceived earlier usage of the English language. As the founding members already had many years of “normal”, 60’s- and 70’s- era English usage behind them, they weren’t able to ever entirely familiarize themselves with the more formal usage they adopted. The younger members of the community, having grown up with this usage, were more comfortable with the speech patterns, and didn’t show the same slight hesitation in their conversation.

What was far more interesting to me, though, and the reason that I enjoyed the film as much as I did, was the interactions between the elders as their carefully constructed Utopia starts to crack. They had set up their community in an effort to escape the evils that they had dealt with in their prior lives — the abuses, violence, and murders of the modern world — but evil is never so easily escaped. Just as the eternal optimist will point out that no matter how bad, everyone has the potential to do good with their life, the opposite is also true: we all have the potential to do evil, be it to ourselves or to others. While the community in The Village managed to avoid the heartache of violence for a time, it was bound to reappear eventually.

As often happens, of course, the very technique that the elders devised to keep their village isolated — the fictitious dangerous creatures in the woods beyond the village’s borders — was a key part of the eventual threat to their adopted way of life. In creating their private Utopia free of any internal evil, they enforced their edict to stay within the village’s borders by creating an external evil. With the same hubris that haunts so many of mankind’s attempts to mold the universe to an ideal, they assumed that they could control this evil — after all, at its heart it was no more than scary bedtime stories and a few frightening-looking costumes.

The borders between an imaginary evil and an actual evil are often far more permeable than is comfortable to admit, however, and by introducing that concept into the community — no matter how safely they thought they did so — it was inevitable that eventually, something would happen to cause those borders to start slipping away. Within the context of the film, it was the jealous love of a mentally disabled member of the community, spurred on by his discovery of one of the creature costumes hidden underneath the floorboards of one of the buildings. Had that not been the situation, however, at some point some other situation would have arisen to threaten the stability of the village. To attempt to create an environment free of evil is a worthy enough endeavor — but to then introduce the very concept of evil as a controlling factor makes the experiment nothing more than extremely foolish idealism at best.

I was impressed that when push came to shove, it was the founder of the community who finally made the decision to risk the community’s exposure by allowing his daughter to travel through the woods to seek help (a risk admittedly tempered by her blindness — but a risk none the less). All too often, the creators of such schemes are shown to be so wrapped up in the idealism of their creation that they steadfastly refuse to entertain any idea that might risk toppling the house of cards they’ve so carefully assembled. Instead, while the rest of the village elders continued to hem and haw, afraid to face the possibility of contact with the world they had left behind, the very man who’d brought them all together and enabled them to create their own private little world was willing and able to put his love for his daughter and his family above his ideals.

All in all, I’m quite impressed with Shyamalan’s work in The Village. Here’s hoping that he’s learned that a movie that exists solely to set up a gag may be enjoyable once or twice, but one that has an actual story to tell beyond the gag will be far more satisfying all around.

iTunes: “We Are Back” by LFO from the album Best of Rave, The Vol. 1 (1991, 4:48).