When I think about The Village in particular, I usually reflect fairly positively on the premise and the progression of the story. The characters in the abstract seem to work, and to draw out the story and the point of it all and everything. The storytelling in his earlier stuff presumably works as well on the page as it does on the screen. Signs progresses reasonably well, even if the ending is a bit of a letdown, though maybe it was merely undercut by some of the awkward staging of pivotal moments. Maybe he just doesn’t know what to do with the oddity that is Joaquin Phoenix, the way other directors have been able to somehow bring out his genius.
It’s just that when these characters and stories make their way to the screen and get assembled together in sequence, they somehow come out flat, usually awkward, sometimes downright farcical. There are a number of intangible aspects to direction that make the role so crucially important to a movie, and the same faults come up too often in Shyamalan’s work for it to be reasonably pinned on anybody else’s hand. As a writer though, despite dialogue that sometimes sounds like it’s out of a bad late night commercial, he may still be salvageable. In the best of all possible worlds.
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Published: May 23, 2013 01:49 am