Lost Boy Shyamalan

Jessica Winter wonders how the promising storyteller behind 'The Sixth Sense' went so far astray.

Aug 11 2006

Whither the boy wonder M Night Shyamalan? Seven summers since 'The Sixth Sense' became the sleeper hit of 1999, the filmmaker has yet to deliver on the promise of his catchphrase-spawning breakthrough. And after years of big (albeit diminishing) box-office returns from his supernatural fables, his latest mythological head-scratcher represents a new career low for the writer-producer-director, who is 36 this month. 'Lady in the Water' earned a disappointing $18.2 million in its opening weekend at the US box office, and ticket sales plummeted 60 per cent the following week.

'Lady in the Water' – wherein a mysterious water nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) turns life upside-down for the lonely superintendent of a Philadelphia apartment complex (the heroic Paul Giamatti) and his wacky crew of tenants – warns off naysayers by arranging a comeuppance for a snide, humourless film critic (played by Bob Balaban).

Undeterred, American reviewers sharpened the same knives they used to disembowel Shyamalan's previous effort, 2004's 'The Village'. Variety dismissed 'Lady' as 'a ponderous, self-indulgent bedtime tale'. The Chicago Tribune recoiled from what it called 'a rogue hunk of hooey'; and the New York Times even proposed that Shyamalan had 'lost his creative marbles'.

It's the same conclusion that Shyamalan assumed his Disney bosses had made when they hesitated over the 'Lady' script. 'You're saying I've lost my mind,' Shyamalan said to (now former) Disney executive Nina Jacobson when she admitted to 'not getting' his story during a tense meeting recounted in Michael Bamberger's new book, 'The Man Who Heard Voices', which details Shyamalan's fallout with Disney and subsequent move to Warner Bros for 'Lady'.

The pitch for Bamberger's book is that it gets inside Shyamalan's mind as he embarks on 'the most daring, ambitious, and deeply personal picture of his life', but what readers might really crave is a peek inside the brain of Bamberger. On its surface, 'The Man Who Heard Voices' is the most tender and extravagant of orthographic blow jobs, wet with credulous salivation about Shyamalan's 'strange, beautiful, audacious' ideas, his foxy wife, his 'Zen master' equilibrium, his possibly telepathic sense of intuition ('if he had these powers,' Bamberger pants, 'where did they come from?').

Shyamalan is not like other men: he is a strange, exotic visitor, fragile and pure. Like a saucer-eyed alien savant, he's easily spooked when, say, he goes to a restaurant: 'The doorman's greeting confused Night. It made him feel paranoid… There were many courses with tiny portions… The waiters hovered excessively.' Shooh, mortal rabble! The changeling needs his space!

So suspiciously oblivious does Bamberger seem to Shyamalan as a comic species, so relentless is his sycophancy, so ripe and sweet are the sugarplums dancing in his head, that one can't help but speculate on what's truly at work here. Has the author fully subscribed to the cult of M Night, embracing the auteur's glass ego and martyr complex? (Shyamalan's personal assistant, Paula, certainly has: in 'The Man Who Heard Voices', when Jacobson doesn't drop everything to read the 'Lady' script the moment Paula delivers it, the poor lackey is devastated: 'She felt like a pile of bricks had hit her. She wanted to throw up.')

Is Bamberger satirising the puff piece, writ large in hardcover? Is the whole thing a deadpan piss-take? This is, after all, a book that includes the following sentence: 'The mechanical problem with the playback rekindled Night's feelings of loneliness.'

Of course, there's a reason why books like Bamberger's and articles like this one are written about Shyamalan, and the reason is 'The Sixth Sense'. His biggest smash still holds up as a solid frightener, and it smuggled in cinematic assets usually relegated to the art house: long, intimate takes; acutely observed relationships; a dusky, autumnal palette; and a rigorous, elegant conception of cinema space (for which much of the credit presumably goes to ace cinematographer Tak Fujimoto).

The movie's weakness for metaphysical goop and rug-pulling gimmickry simply suggested that Shyamalan should not direct his own scripts – a hypothesis that was promptly proven by his follow-up, 'Unbreakable' (2000), which cast 'Sixth Sense' star Bruce Willis as an ordinary man who discovers extraordinary powers after escaping a train wreck.

The movie disfigured itself with a forced, hokey ending that tried to duplicate the satisfying whomp of the 'Sixth Sense' twist, but it did successfully duplicate that film's real attributes, as Shyamalan again conjured convincing, melancholic domestic tension and held patiently for pregnant moments on Fujimoto's ghostly compositions.

And then 'Signs' (2002). This seemed like juvenilia, as if Shyamalan had dug out the proverbial script from the bottom drawer and slapped it onscreen; only this time the dusty screenplay dated back to the auteur's days in short pants. Or perhaps the story about aliens and love and death and baseball and poison gas was brand-new, improvised on set by a precocious child. The only difference is that little boys making up stories aren't rewarded with a cover of Newsweek proclaiming them 'The Next Spielberg'.

Centred on a former man of the cloth who loses his faith after his wife's gruesome demise, 'Signs' – and the equally extemporaneous films that followed it – showed the markings of what happens to a lot of successful artists cocooned by early triumph and fulsome praise: a marked estrangement from how actual people live, speak, and behave. This is a problem Shyamalan has since subliminally addressed by scripting 'The Village' in an unbearable pidgin-Amish patois and overstuffing 'Lady' with bizarre, inarticulate creatures known as 'narfs' and 'scrunts' and 'shrill ethnic stereotypes'.

'Signs' was also significant for laying bare the icky essence of Shyamalan's unyielding grief-porn shtick, which might be summarised by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde: To make one manipulative film about the horrendous deaths of loved one(s) may be regarded as a misfortune, but to make several looks like carelessness. Watching Shyamalan lose his marbles would be a lot more fun if so many innocent people didn't have to die.

'Lady in the Water' is out on Friday.

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