by Matt Barr

In defense of M. Night Shyamalan

Is the subtitle of a good Slate piece by Ross Douthat: I See Good Movies.

It's worth comparing Shyamalan's career choices, for instance, with those of Bryan Singer, another wunderkind director whose big break was a dark-horse hit with a twist ending. Since establishing himself with The Usual Suspects in 1995, Singer has essentially reinvented himself as a director of comic-book blockbusters, a man to be trusted with massive budgets and well-known franchises. He's been making movies for the studios, in other words, instead of doing what Shyamalan has tried to do—which is to persuade the studios to make movies for him.

Of course there's nothing wrong, per se, with directing the two X-Men movies and Superman Returns, and Singer deserves all the kudos he's received for crafting high-standard summer entertainment.

...

But this path comes with a price. You find yourself making sequels and franchise pictures rather than finding (or writing) new and unusual stories of your own. You labor to elevate essentially flimsy material rather than starting off with something deeper and more complicated. And even when you raise the bar, you aren't raising it terribly high: For all the poise and polish and "subtext" of Singer's superhero movies, nothing he's done lately rises much above the level of a well-oiled July afternoon thrill ride, let alone his early work in Suspects.

...

Similarly, Steven Spielberg was widely praised for stripping last summer's War of the Worlds of countless genre tropes—panicked generals, heroic presidents, mad scientists, and so on. But it was Shyamalan's Signs, three years earlier, that was actually the more daring space-invader movie, in its attempt to meld science-fiction and horror by bringing the aliens home, to a single farmhouse and family, and using them as the sum of all our metaphysical fears. Sure, it lost momentum in the last act, with a literal deus ex machina and a less-than-frightening computer-generated alien, but then again, the third-act problem is one that no alien-invasion movie has managed to solve, Spielberg's least of all.

Even The Village, Shyamalan's least-liked movie to date, has a great deal to recommend it. A weird, slight, and beautiful fable about utopia and modernity, it was dressed up as another twist-ending zapper and marketed as a Sixth Sense-style thriller, which left critics and audiences alike feeling understandably cheated. But if you strip away the studio hype and the director's showman tics, it makes an intriguing counterpoint to his earlier movies—as a partial rebuke to their credulous supernaturalism, perhaps, and as an attempt (by a director as sex-shy as Spielberg) to grope, with his blind heroine, through the comforts and terrors of fairy tales toward the darker wisdom of adulthood.

It's also a terrific love story.

Shyamalan seems to be aiming for something, amid our summers of high-grossing superhero movies and our winters of little-seen Oscar-bait projects, that's increasingly rare these days: a marriage of entertainment and art, of mass-market tastes and elite sensibilities. This is a hard combination to pull off, as his stumbles have demonstrated, but it's precisely the goal that the film industry, home to our last mass art form, ought to be aspiring to. So, Shyamalan deserves credit, despite his vanity and his missteps—not because he's succeeding, necessarily, but because he's willing to keep trying and unwilling to take his place with those timid, highly compensated directors who know neither victory nor defeat.

True dat. I have a thing up on BTD about Shyamalan today.

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