For fans like me, the movie is unbeatable; for non-fans, it may be unbearable.
When is a superhero movie not a superhero movie? When it's "Unbreakable."
Writer-producer-director M. Night Shyamalan rose to meteoric stardom on the strength of a single film, "The Sixth Sense" in 1999. Since then, the quality of his output, although not the extent of his popularity, has declined with each new movie. "The Sixth Sense" kept folks guessing all the way through and came up with an ending that had everybody fooled; "Unbreakable" (2000), which we'll examine here, was not quite as satisfying, starting out as one kind of movie and ending up as something entirely different, much to the delight of this reviewer and the dismay of many others; "Signs" (2002) contained a terrific first half and then wound down to a most inadequate finish; "The Village" (2004) began with a promising premise and quickly disintegrated into pure silliness, with a conclusion so mundane it made you weep for could have been; and "Lady in the Water" (2006) was little more than a makeshift fairy tale the filmmaker made as a vanity project for his children, a movie that failed at almost every level.
But let's look at the man's bright spots, one of which is "Unbreakable." Shyamalan and star Bruce Willis had combined talents previously to make the enormously popular ghost story, "The Sixth Sense." So, let me tell you up front and frankly, if you liked that movie and its unique gimmick and you're expecting more of the same from "Unbreakable," you will probably be disappointed. It's not that the new movie is dissatisfying per se or that it doesn't have a good gimmick of its own. It's that this story ends just where a lot of people will be expecting it to begin. "Unbreakable" has quite a dissimilar plot from "The Sixth Sense," with very different characters, set in a very different world. Yet it presents a story of similarly quiet tensions.
The story involves two people of about the same age, one a frail, fragile, crippled man named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), and the other a strong, sturdy, healthy man named David Dunn (Willis). We meet Elijah first, at the time of his birth, delivered with both his arms and legs broken. He has a genetic disorder that causes his bones to fracture easily. As he is growing up, the other children call him "Mr. Glass" for his tendency to shatter easily. As an adult, Elijah owns a collector's comic-book gallery called "Limited Edition."
Meanwhile, David is a security guard for a university stadium, with a wife, Audrey (Robin Wright Penn), and a young son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark). David is about as ordinary a guy as you could imagine, until one day he's involved in a horrendous train wreck where everybody is killed except him. He miraculously survives, and he doesn't know why. Then Elijah contacts him. Elijah, it seems, studies comics as a form of truth and beauty, as folklore based on fact. He firmly believes that comic-book superheroes walk the Earth, only sometimes they don't know who they are. Elijah is convinced that David is such a superhero.
David is understandably skeptical of the possibility, although his son is not. His son buys into the possibility of his father's being a superhero. David merely thinks Elijah is nuts, and so do we for a while. Until David begins taking stock of himself and discovers a few things he's never thought about before. Like the point that he's never been sick a day in his life, not even with a sore throat. Like he's never been physically hurt. Like when he tries to do so, he can lift three times the weight he ever thought he could. Like he has the instinctive ability to know when people are good or evil, when they're carrying guns or drugs. Like he's able to look into people's souls and know what they've done bad. Like maybe he really is gifted and invincible.
Basically, David comes to the conclusion, obviously late in life, that he may be a superhero and ought to use his powers for good; thus on one level we have in "Unbreakable" a nearly two-hour prologue to a conventional superhero movie. You know, like in "Superman" and "Batman" we're given the details about how the heroes got to be heroes. Well, that's mainly what we get here. Shyamalan even admits in one of the accompanying featurettes that he originally intended to make a traditional superhero movie where only the first third of the plot was devoted to the hero's recognition of his powers, but as the writer of the story as well as the producer and director, he became so fascinated by the recognition part that he decided to make it the subject of the whole movie.
But that's only on one level. On another level, Shyamalan sets his story in a completely real, workaday world, which provides some jarring juxtapositions. David is a common Joe, his job doesn't pay much, his marriage is falling apart, and his son feels distant from him. Into this very concrete universe, this cosmos like yours or mine, Shyamalan introduces us to a possible fantasy. This is where the rub comes in. Comic-book worlds are filled with pure make-believe; we come to accept them as such. Real-life worlds are filled with believable, credible events; we come to accept them as such. Certainly, the best of fantasy creates a believable world out of some degree of reality, a world that we don't really believe in literally but one we can pretend to believe in for a few minutes or a few hours. It's the old "suspension of disbelief" idea. But Shyamalan goes to great lengths to have it both ways, and neither way at the same time. He tries very hard to make us believe that superheroes are possible in a real-life setting, yet I'm not sure he succeeds. Of course, maybe that is his point.
Ultimately, we are who we think we are. As Elijah says, "The scariest thing is not knowing your place in the world." Or as Shakespeare says, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Or as Popeye says, "I yam what I yam." If David wants to be a superhero or a tugboat captain, it's up to him. The film is as good a psychological study of human behavior as it is an extended preface to an action thriller.
That at its conclusion this film stimulated a rare and spirited discussion between the Wife-O-Meter and myself demonstrates that it's not a film to be taken lightly. She didn't like it very much; I liked it most of the way. She couldn't accept the collaboration of fantasy and reality being foisted upon her; she resented Elijah's unsolicited intrusion into David's life; and she thought the ending was sloppy. Make it a comic-book fiction or a real-life drama, but don't try to combine the two. On the other hand, I bought the superhero angle just as wholly as David's son did. Perhaps both Joseph and I were looking for the same things--a sense of adventure--while my wife, although loving fantasy, is more pragmatic about the real world; she doesn't mind pretending, but she doesn't want someone shoving it down her throat. I don't know; ambiguity in a film is sometimes fun and thought-provoking, but it can also be highly frustrating to viewers who want solid answers by a film's end.
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