...an enigma to which each viewer must bring something and from which each viewer will most likely take something away. In my case, I brought a lot more than I took away.
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M. Night Shyamalan is such a good storyteller (and he has such a great name) that anything he does is worth a look. Some more so than others. In the case of "The Village," his 2004 entry in the eerie-spooky genre, it's somewhat less. The man can tell a good story, but here he hasn't a good story to tell.
Of course, if Shyamalan feels he was misunderstood in "The Village," he can't say he didn't bring the problem upon himself. It was he, after all, who wrote and directed three previous films with "surprise" endings that have conditioned us to expect such things. And he provides us with at the very least an unexpected ending in "The Village." If people don't like the ending, and I include myself among them, well, I'd say that's understandable. Maybe he shouldn't count on his endings any longer to provide the bulk of a viewer's enjoyment. The fact is, most of "The Village" is quite good, quite well told, quite well presented, with a load of mystery, suspense, and expectation. It just doesn't pay off in its last third the way it might.
Shyamalan's reputation appears at this point in his career to rest on controversy. After the success of "The Sixth Sense," a lot of people were let down by "Unbreakable." I, for one, thought "Unbreakable" was brilliant, a gutsy call in wrapping up a superhero movie where other superhero movies begin. Then we had "Signs," which built up a wonderful premise, only to be let down by a rather corny finish. Still, there was enough in "Signs" to keep an audience involved most of the way.
But with "The Village," we run into the issue of success breeding too much anticipation. If a film is going to do little more than make the viewer wonder how it's going to turn out, as happens in "The Village," then that conclusion, that final revelation, had better be a doozy. Here, it isn't. Indeed, it's mundane, prosaic. Not only are the events of the movie's last thirty minutes or so mundane, they're either shallow or nonsensical, depending on how you look at them.
Let me explain. The setting for the story is a large area of farmland, surrounded by low hills and trees. In the middle is a small village, wherein the simple folk of the town live and work in seeming harmony. The time period is indefinite, but by the look of people's clothing and their lack of modern amenities, it could be the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Only one detail impinges on these characters' uninterrupted bliss: The things that go bump in the night.
No one leaves the area. To do so would be to risk certain death at the hands of "those we do not speak of," the creatures who inhabit the surrounding woods. The village is encircled by guard towers to keep watch on intruders from the forest, unknown entities who sometimes stealthily invade the village by night to do their covert but apparently malign work. So the villagers are isolated, and they have been for as long as anyone can remember.
The village elders are headed up by Edward Walker (William Hurt) and Alice Hunt (Sigourney Weaver). They are part of a council of elders who oversee the activities of the little town. The village romantics are Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), a young blind woman, and Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), a young man, who fall in love and decide to marry. The village idiot, and there must always be a traditional village idiot, is Noah Percy (Adrien Brody).
Hurt and Weaver are skilled in their roles, conveying an apt sense of kindness, wisdom, and paternal guidance. Phoenix is equally adept as the quiet young fellow eager to pass through the village boundaries for a good cause but sensible enough generally to keep his distance from the perimeter. Howard is sensational as the spunky and vivacious heroine who proves her intelligence and her courage despite her handicap. For her performance, I would personally nominate Ms. Howard for an award, any award, but an Oscar would be appropriate, she's so convincing. And as mentally challenged Noah, Brody is simply bizarre, chewing up the scenery in every shot he's in, which is too many.
So, here are the problems I found:
(1) How are we supposed to enjoy all of this as it's happening when we're constantly wondering about and trying to second guess what its secret is, how it's all going to end?
And, (2) more important, how are we supposed to interpret the story, literally or symbolically or both?
In the case of number one above, I could hardly concentrate on the story line as I kept trying to figure out how Shyamalan was going to draw it to a close. As I said above, he has brought on himself the dilemma of the surprise ending, so he should know that his audience is going to be trying to work out in their own minds whatever surprise there might be. I came up with at least a half a dozen different scenarios, some with "Signs" like implications for the climax, but nothing prepared me for the letdown I experienced when the ending finally did arrive. Let's just say it is definitely unexpected, but in the wrong way, failing to answer some fundamental questions that arose in retrospect and creating some new ones as well. Suffice it to say that the ending made no logical or literal sense to me when I thought about it even a little.
In the case of number two above, as I was attempting to figure out the ending before it came, I was also trying to see if I could detect any metaphoric sense in what was happening. You all remember Shirley Jackson's short story and stage play "The Lottery," I'm sure. It was the allegory of the village that holds an annual lottery contest with horrendous results. An audience's reaction to that story is inevitably the same--shock, dismay, and confusion at first, followed by some consideration, some thought, and, one hopes, some understanding that the story communicates a much bigger picture of human prejudice and closed-mindedness than at first appears. Could "The Village" contain such simple yet essential truths, I wondered. Could the movie be reflecting some deep-seated fear that Mankind holds of the unknown? Could the story represent the fact that we can't run away from our problems? Could the story be a parable of knowledge vs. ignorance? Could Ivy's blindness represent people's inability or unwillingness to see the real world around them? Could innocence be forever protected? Could heartache truly be avoided? At one point, I even wondered if the traces of red, the "bad color" the villagers see in the forest and so dread, could represent the old "Red Scare" of the fifties and sixties, our fear of the Evil Empire of Communism, somehow transmuted into a present-day apprehension of people or nations who are different from ourselves.
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