We rent, borrow, or buy many movies. It’s a better deal, at this point, for us to just buy a movie than to take the family out to see the movie new in the theater. Don’t get me wrong, we go out to movies, but unless it’s a “must-see”, we just don’t go, and wait for it to come out on DVD.
So anyway, Friday night Christy and I watched M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village” together. The thing I really enjoy about Shymalan’s movies is that they are rarely about what you think they are about, and that unpredictability keeps you guessing, without in-your-face gore and horror-type stuff.
I’m not sure I want to give the movie a rating, really. It’s a movie that made me think. Made me think about how legends are born and grow. It made me think about issues that touched intimately on how I view the world.
If you haven’t seen it yet, please bookmark this review and come back another time. There are some spoilers contained herein that very well might ruin the movie for you. It’s a movie about a blind girl taking a scary trip through the woods in order to retrieve medicine to save her ailing fiance. In a nutshell, that’s what it’s about.
But that’s not at all what it’s about.
The movie opens, and one is left wondering whether the people displayed are Amish or something. Something’s not quite right — they all have stories of murdered loved ones, for instance — that causes one to resist stereotyping them into some sort of religious group. For one, there is no mention of religion anywhere in the movie, except one:
Those Whom We Do Not Discuss
As J.K. Rowling put it, using the voice of Hermione Granger, “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.” And, actually, they discuss Those Whom We Do Not Discuss quite often.
Now, I’ve read some reviews (after seeing the movie) that rip Shyamalan a new one for playing the same tired trick again and again: the surprise ending. The Big Shock. The Unexpected Twist. Yet, I think that in this movie, Shyamalan actually plays on the audience expectation of The Big Twist by delivering it early, and ending the movie with simple, classic drama. It seems as if he expects the audience to come to the conclusion early this time, and to wait to see how it plays out.
And, in my opinion, it delivers in a big way, leaving many unanswered questions and allegories to relatively modern-day events which kept me thinking about it for days afterwards:
- Where did the Walker Foundation get the money to buy the whole reserve, and continue to keep security guards employed keeping it safe?
- Who administers this Foundation on a day-to-day basis?
- Why did The Boss let his employee steal the medicine right in front of him?
- What did the employee do after his encounter with the blind girl?
- Why did the people of the village choose to abstain from all contractions and slang in their speech?
- That one fat guy who wears the suit… it didn’t look homemade. How old was that suit he wears for basically the whole movie?
- Why can’t the schoolteacher have a relationship with the gal played by Sigourney Weaver? And when did Weaver get so @$!^*(!% old???
- What happens after the story ends?
The movie is about heartache following humanity regardless of our attempts to escape it. It’s about a girl choosing to perpetuate a myth based on her subjective realities, even when confronted with the truth of their mythology.
It’s about the birth of legends, and how easy it is, with a little vigilance, to deceive others, particularly if one has the best of intentions.
That last point, to me, is the biggest, and has many allegories to my past, and that of many others I know. A man leads a group of others, united in heartache, to a new land in an attempt to get away from worldly influences. The leaders agree to perpetuate a myth in order to persuade the townsfolk to live in a way most suited to their control (of course, with the best of intentions to keep evil at bay). Yet despite their efforts, things fall apart in the specifics, and those who challenge the myth are alternately venerated and suppressed by those in power.
And finally, the one most motivated to do what needs to be done is let in on the secret, but even the leader involved doesn’t understand that her unique perspective will only reinforce the strength of the legend. By passing on the torch, the schoolteacher has created another generation that will continue to use the same myth to control their children.
The real question is: is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Does serving the “higher purpose” of keeping the community isolated from external “bad things”, in the long run, mean anything at all? Since even in such an isolated community, bad things continue to happen, does this just mean that such efforts to protect the sanctity of the “chosen people” are, ultimately, doomed to failure?
A very interesting movie, with very interesting ramifications. Then again, one of my friends said it’s a “snoozer”. I wonder why our perspectives are so different?