Night Shyamalan's spooky tales are a hit with audiences but not critics. It's the way he likes it, writes Carrie Rickey
W EST of Philadelphia, the suburbs shrug their shoulders and the terrain gets hilly and horsey, like a storybook illustration by N.C. Wyeth.
Wyeth country, where artists once lived and chief executives now make their homes, is the weekend retreat of one of America's most successful artist-CEOs.
Here, a 20-minute drive from his "weekday home" in the suburb of Gladwyne, M. Night Shyamalan comes to a 30-hectare farm to daydream and write screenplays at a refectory table facing a bay window that looks out on a shimmering pond.
The willow curtsying at water's edge resembles a nymph descending into her bath. A visitor to this retreat wonders if it inspired Lady in the Water, the filmmaker's latest supernatural tale.
Shyamalan's seventh feature began as a bedtime story for his two daughters. In it, Paul Giamatti's faith is tried when he encounters an alien life form (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the swimming pool of his apartment complex. Under her spell, jaded residents join to protect her ? but can they?
Losing faith, finding faith, testing faith. The Shyamalan three-act scenario of spiritual renewal connects profoundly with audiences, if not with the critics who slam him as a one-hit wonder whose career has taken a slide since The Sixth Sense in 1999.
"That's an easy way to dismiss a body of work," says the 35-year-old with the puppy eyes and dogged work ethic. "That's perception, not reality."
Reality is that if every movie he makes doesn't gross $A700 million, it is a perceived disappointment, whatever its merits.
If Shyamalan is under-appreciated by the critical establishment, he is in excellent company. Says Anne Thompson of The Hollywood Reporter: "This is exactly how the critics once regarded Steven Spielberg."
On a sweltering July morning, Shyamalan wears jeans, a lavender shirt and an amulet around his neck. A nimbus of inky hair frames his face.
Poised on a couch in his study, where the centrepiece on his coffee table is an electric typewriter of 1960s vintage, he resembles a performer waiting to take the stage.
The effect is that of Bob Dylan, circa 1967, which is perhaps intentional. For The Village and Lady in the Water are the filmmaker's protest songs.
The 2004 film, about an isolated religious community, criticises fundamentalists who shelter their flock from the modern world. The new movie damns cynics who cannot take social action and connect with others in a meaningful way.
In Lady, Shyamalan himself plays the second lead, Vic, a writer about whom the lady in the water makes a prophecy.
The idea for Vic came from Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin influenced President Abraham Lincoln to abolish slavery.
"Vic is a link in the chain of events," Shyamalan says. "He's one voice who might inspire another to change the world."
From his filmmaker's debut feature, Praying With Anger (1992), about an Indian American spiritually reawakened by his visit to the motherland, through Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002), his theme has been consistent.
So has his box office. His last four films, all made by Disney, have earned at least a quarter of a billion dollars each at theatres worldwide. Collectively, they've taken in more than $1.5 billion. Consider that box office represents on average 16 per cent of a film's revenues, and . . . well, you do the maths. It's close to $10 billion.
"Only John Lasseter at Pixar can boast a record like Night's," says Thompson. And Lasseter didn't write and direct all his movies.
Short-term profits are nice, but long-term resonance matters more to Shyamalan. He uses a different metric. The filmmaker read in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the "cola wars", in which Pepsi won the supermarket aisle "sip test" but Coke was the victor in the "take-home" contest, being the beverage consumers drank at backyard barbecues.
"I measure the success of a movie by the degree of difficulty plus the aspiration times the take-home effect," he says. "Staying power is what counts.
"Using that formula, Unbreakable is the best movie I've made ? if the lowest-grossing."
Though it earned a quarter-billion worldwide, a third of The Sixth Sense, it was perceived as a disappointment, "Just as Close Encounters, which grossed about a third of Jaws, was considered a disappointment for Spielberg," Shyamalan notes.
"Unbreakable lives on in a Kanye West rap, in doctoral theses, in chatrooms," writes Michael Bamberger in The Man Who Heard Voices, about the making of Lady in the Water.
Bamberger's book, which stands alongside Lillian Ross's Picture as that rare, inside look at how Hollywood actually works, details Shyamalan's split with Disney.
In movies, as in sports, big talent comes with big ego. All who meet Shyamalan marvel they've never known anyone with such humility and cocksureness. He is thin-skinned and hardheaded. The former makes him sensitive; the latter, impervious to obstacles.
And that's what counts in Hollywood.
Lady in the Water opens September 7.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/stor ... 20,00.html
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
