Unspeakable and Unstoppable

I'm one of those who loved M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Sixth Sense, which I found beautiful and powerful despite a glitch or two; so I've been looking forward to his new one, Unbreakable, with considerable anticipation. I wanted to see it before the reviews broke, just to see what I made of it without any outside input, so I persuaded my husband and brother in law to go see it this afternoon on opening day.

Mistake. This movie is very, very, very, long (and seems longer), and very murky, as if the whole thing was shot through dirty green glass. At times I could almost imagine I was at a French film, the dialog went so slowly, with endless meaningful pauses between short, largely banal lines. But nobody smoked, so I knew it was America.

Okay, spoilers ahead, so read no further if you wish to see this film without knowing any of its secrets; skip to the text break for comments on a good movie.

For starters, the sense of pacing that made Sixth Sense so breathtaking is completely missing here, and the result is what feels to me, as a writer, like a clumsy attempt at a first novel. Two thirds or more of the film are devoted to the build-up to what would be an actual story, which begins when the hero (Bruce Willis) accepts that he is a real-world Superman. He's only a lowly security guard, but he is really been put on this earth to protect us all from Supervillains like Samuel L. Jackson (in Prince-like glitter clothes and a wheelchair) who has been deliberately causing disasters in order to flush this hidden Superman out into the open so that — so that what, we never do discover. Instead of the story that Jackson's purpose might create, we get hours of Willis working his way toward self-knowledge with the speed and agility of a man trying to walk fast across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Or maybe of a mime, miming a man trying to walk fast across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

When Willis has finally accepted that he is a flesh-and-blood Superman, there's a little flurry of action jammed into the last ten minutes or so. Then Willis faces Jackson in his lair in order to get everything explained — and to not have a confrontation. Willis just leaves, and white lettering on the screen tells you that Willis called the cops, and that Jackson is now in a mental institution. The End.

So much potential, so little result! How might it affect a plain working stiff to realize that he's really Superman? What would he do with that knowledge, how would he deal with it, and how would the world deal with him? What if the world really did turn out to contain polar extremes, good guys and bad guys with unusual powers, disguised as regular people, and that the comic books we knew and loved as kids were only a despised vulgarization of a deeper, more significant reality? Might our Superman decide he preferred being a security guard to taking on higher-ranking forces of evil than the local drug pusher or nut with a gun, and would his insistent fate contrive to blast him loose anyway? And so on — but, alas, I digress. And it's no use objecting that if I'd ever loved comics, I'd respond differently. I did love comics, enough to read them on the sly at my best friend's house because my mother wouldn't let me indulge at home.

My husband suggests that this script is a pet project that M.N.S. has been trying for years to mold into an hommage to the comics he loved as a kid, and that after the success of The Sixth Sense he returned to it and tried to breathe life into its pallid corpse because he was persuaded that he'd better get something else out there quick, before people forgot The Sixth Sense. He'd have done much better, it seems to me, to have kept a dignified silence until a new idea arrived for him to work with.

I, for one, will never forget The Sixth Sense, but I'm going to do my best to forget Unbreakable as fast as I can.

* * *

Since it's a holiday weekend we got to go to another movie, and this time we picked a winner: Billy Elliot, which is being dissed by the critics (who admit to loving it, but with embarrassment) for being a formula film — and it is, the formula being Rocky but in arts instead of sports. Well, I am here to tell you that the formula basis scarcely matters. This picture is so lovingly made, so visually beautiful, so spirited, and so generous with its players' talents that it's a continual joy to behold. Yeah, we know how the story's going to end — the gifted son of a miner in an economically blighted corner of Britain is going to complete his unlikely transformation into a ballet dancer, is going to overcome his father's shocked opposition, is going to win a place at the Royal Ballet School — no spoiler-warnings needed here because we all know this fairy tale from countless movies like it (one of the best recent variations being Good Will Hunting).

So let me point out a few of the things that raise this movie, for me, well above the hackneyed trajectory of the stereotypical struggle to triumph by means of innate gifts, persistence, and inspired mentoring.

First, Billy is not beautiful when his face or body is in repose. His ears stick out, he frowns and scowls, his lips are thin and his nose long and pointy, his eyes are kind of small and dark, and his haircut is bad. So when he leaps into gorgeous physical action, the transformation is real, not prettyness piled on top of prettyness.

Second, the switch of his father from bullying opponent to sturdy support is effected through a dazzling scene which starts out spearing the audience with terror that the father and his pals, drunk and angry over how their strike is going, will (when they discover Billy practicing with his best friend who is wearing a tutu) murder the gay kid and beat up Billy in a frenzy of alcoholic rage and resentment.

It's not that kind of movie. Instead, the father alone challenges his son, and Billy responds with a dance that reaches the father not because it's a great dance — Billy's a kid, his dancing is powerful but rough and plain — but because the dance expresses the raw fury that the boy is feeling at being constantly checked and blocked in his efforts to train his talent. And that, connecting viscerally with the father's feelings about the miners' strike that is the backdrop of the story of Billy's progress, is what brings about the father's change of heart: the dancing expresses what he himself feels, not some artsy, rarified fairy tale.

The moment is slightly fumbled in that the father's reaction isn't presented clearly enough. But it works all the same. And it illustrates for the audience (show, don't tell, remember?) exactly what Billy's teacher is talking about when she says that the judges at the Royal Ballet are looking not for polished skills but for the gift of truly expressive physicality.

Third, the background of the strike is refreshingly different from the usual gimmicks used in this kind of movie to provide conflict. It's not a rivalry with another boy who's an enemy because of race, class, or some other differential leading to the usual fight for the prize; it's not the down-drag of some criminal connection (like a gang) that our hero must break away from; it's not the strain to recover from a stroke or a broken leg or a beating administered by the competition, or a demoralizing early defeat that has to be overcome. It's the economy, stupid; it's the miserable, grinding reality of people who work their lives out at the mercy of bosses and governments that have no concern for them. The strike background makes the story feel real in a way that matches the gorgeous, keen, hard-edged photography, so that the film's style is perfectly mated to its subject and its setting.

Fourth, I'm always happy to see a film of this type that isn't about sports. Here we have a story demonstrating the idea that male aspiration on the physical, athletic level doesn't always have to be about some kind of game where you pound the Hell out of your opponent or otherwise tear him down in order to win. There's a very specific statement of this in the conceit that Billy gets sidetracked by dance on his way to a boxing lesson (a nod, in fact, to Rocky and a hundred movies about poor boys breaking out of poverty with their fists).

There's an odd little twist to the end, in view of the great play given throughout the film to the objection that ballet is for girls and "poofs," which is (apparently) nonsense in Billy's case. He leaves his gay pal behind with a sweet but manly farewell, and goes away to school. Jump-cut to performance night years later when we see his broad, strong back as he prepares for his entrance, and behold: Billy is dancing in "Swan Lake," but no, it's not the old "Swan lake" — it's Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake," in which the Prince discovers that he's gay through the ministrations of a chorus of male swans in white furry knickers, and Billy (only now he's Adam Cooper, who if I am not mistaken created the role originally) is dancing the apparently bisexual head Swan (who does not, so far as I can tell on the tape I have, have any such leaping entrance anywhere in the ballet).

Cooper doesn't resemble young Billy in the least — his features, that ski-jump nose with the broad base in particular, are all wrong — but there's only a glimpse or two of him, and what's important is the grace and power of his take off toward the stage. I was willing to suspend my disbelief at least that high.

Is this ending a sly intimation (for those who know this particular ballet, styled in the press as "The Gay Swan Lake") that in fact Billy is bent (well, in any event not straight) after all? I don't know, but it does seem to be a statement of something, or why not choose a more conventional ballet, or one that is unconventional in a different way, for Billy's debut?

But I don't care one way or the other, really.

I loved this film, and yes, it made me cry (also most of the folks in my row). It was emotion honestly won.

--SMC
November 24, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas