Just finished watching Unbreakable, which I stuck near the top of the Netflix queue right after we saw Signs — Suanna for the first time, me for the second. This M. Night guy, he’s one to watch.
My clearest memory of Unbreakable from when it first came out was storming out of the theatre at what seemed like a cheap ending — surprise twists evidently being Shyamalan’s schtick since hitting the big time with The Sixth Sense. I had forgotten that up until that point he is a masterful director, crafting each scene in a slow, stately style that rewards every moment you spend savoring his shots. The weight room scene can stand as an object-lesson of his genius. Its tension builds, subtly but powerfully. Camera work is innovative but not obtrusive. The whole scene is humorous in a way that’s so understated you almost miss it.
And, perhaps because I knew it was coming, the ending didn’t bother me quite as much either. I don’t think unveiling Mr. Glass as the villain is cheap any more, though it is inelegant. I imagine he’s going for the same effect as in Sixth Sense, where the twist leaves you racing back through the movie mentally, but still rounds out the plot nicely. In Unbreakable, he gets the impact but misses the closure. We’re still left with too many questions about what the end revelation is going to do to David Dunn — will his family hold together? Will he actually continue on fighting evil?
I haven’t cried at a movie since watching E.T. when I was a kid. And I still haven’t — I don’t get very emotional at movies. Shyamalan’s the only guy in recent memory who has even managed to get me a little choked up. In Unbreakable it’s the moment when Dunn’s son reacts to seeing him nod from across the kitchen table, letting him that he’s the hero in the paper. (It’s a open question how much of my response was due to brilliant direction, and how much was due to the emotional vagaries of impending fatherhood.)
M. Night doesn’t make “pretty good” movies. He makes ambitious, amazing movies that have big flaws. One of these times, every piece is going to fall together for him, and he’s going to make a truly great movie and earn a place in film history. I’m looking forward to it.
11 comments
September 1, 2003 at 9:32 pm
Eve Tushnet
1) I’m not an impending father (!), but I too choked up at the breakfast-table scene.
2) Thought the ending twist was brilliant, actually–maybe because it played right into one of my personal obsessions: how far we are willing to go in order to have a _role_ in the world, a place that makes sense. How desperately we search for a role. To me, the ending Shyamalan chose was the most hardcore option possible.
ELT
September 1, 2003 at 10:47 pm
nate
Eve: I agree with you about what makes the twist cool, and if there had been another half-hour to the movie to work out some of the implications, I would have been perfectly happy with it. In any case, it’s definitely an ending that’s growing on me.
September 2, 2003 at 7:29 am
Jim Henley
The case against the ending is the one disability activists would make: “Oh. So the cripple is the bad guy. Again.”
I liked it, though.
September 2, 2003 at 1:02 pm
Ben
Completely agree with your interpretation. M. Night has a perfect movie in him, somewhere. He’ll find it eventually.
I, too, get choked up when I watch the table scene.
September 2, 2003 at 2:14 pm
Diana
I hated Unbreakable and thought Signs was a dud. But I agree w/you about Shyamalan; he’s talented & I hope that one day he’ll hit the ball outta the park, so I’ll keep going.
September 2, 2003 at 3:58 pm
Jim Henley
I liked signs better than Diana did, but you had to swallow the idea that this story was taking place in the only farmhouse in Pennsylvania where the residents had a) no gun; b) no notion that they might acquire one.
What Shyamalan is great at is family dynamics. That carries Signs for me, and more than carries Unbreakable. What I liked best in Signs, though, was that the first proof that the Mel Gibson character was coming back to his faith was when he started _cursing_ God.
September 2, 2003 at 4:07 pm
nate
Jim: Fair point on the gun. I also loved that “cursing God” moment — I thought it was terrific, and that the very last moment of the movie, where we see him putting his clerical collar back on, oversold and even cheapened a point that had been made perfectly the scene before.
September 3, 2003 at 2:50 pm
Michael Yuri
I actually thought the twist ending in Unbreakable was perfect. What ruined it for me was the attempt to wrap everything up in a paragraph on the screen at the end. You know, the whole “Elijah Price was arrested and sent to a mental institution” thing.
I think it would have worked much better if it had ended just before that, with the look on Bruce Willis’s face when he realizes that Jackson’s character was the bad guy all along.
September 4, 2003 at 3:09 pm
Dave
I wanted to like Unbreakable, but I kept getting distracted by the cinematography. I was too aware of what the camera was doing, and not able to focus on plot and characterization.
M. Night (does that sound like a character in Street Fighter II, or what?) is a good director, but I submit he’ll never truly be world class until he figures out how to make the shots convey the story, instead of dominating it.
September 4, 2003 at 3:20 pm
nate
Seems that I’ll be needing to see this movie a third time with a special eye for the ending. It’s funny — I didn’t talk to many people about it at after it came out, but the universal opinion among those I did talk with was that the ending sucked. Here, it’s near-universal the other way.
Dave: There must be some line, on one side of which camera work is unobtrusive unless you’re looking for it, and on the other is calling attention to itself. And naturally the line is in different places for different people. The unforgiveable fault is to have camera work that 1) calls attention to itself and 2) is pretentious, overdone, or otherwise inept. I don’t think M. Night is guilty of any of those things.
January 19, 2004 at 1:51 am
jim
re: Unbreakable’s “text paragraph” ending.
Shyamalan designs each and every scene (from lighting to framing) to resemble a comic book. A text-only coda is perfectly in keeping with the genre of comics: it tells you all of the uninteresting stuff that happens off-camera to tie up thes story, not wanting to waste precious space on the obvious shot of Elijah behind bars. It teases and tantalizes without being obvious.
I found it inoffensive and completely appropriate,though I do find it absolutely ridiculous that people would dislike an entire movie because of a five second shot of text.