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Unbelievable!
Is Signs a morality play or a sci-fi thriller? Or both?
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Prem Panicker
The average human has a 'what if?' nerve. What if the darker shape in my dark bedroom is my dead father come to pay me a visit? What if a Mandrake or a Phantom or a Spiderman was for real? What if that sound outside the window was something outside of what I know of as 'human', visiting from god knows where?
It is this nerve M Night Shyamalan mines in his films --- from The Sixth Sense to Unbreakable and now, Signs.
Mel Gibson is Graham Hess, a former clergyman who has lost the faith after his wife's accidental death (referenced in various flashbacks). He quits the pulpit and raises corn on a Pennsylvania farm with his failed baseball player brother (Joaquin Phoenix) and two young kids.
One morning, Hess sees huge holes punched into his cornfields --- the work, he thinks, of local pranksters. But then a spate of similar occurrences is reported from other parts of the world. Television images show unidentified craft whizzing through the night skies; random sightings of extra terrestrials are reported from around the world --- and it is soon evident that Earth is engaged in a titanic struggle against alien invaders.
For Hess, already undergoing a crisis of faith, this creates big, cosmic questions. Does he find answers? And does he recover his faith in time to rescue his family?
That, pretty much, is the storyline --- a blend of sci-fi and morality play.
The opening is impeccable --- jolting, slashing strings build mood as the credits roll, and the director cuts immediately into the chase, introducing the crop circles motif even before latecomers have fully settled into their seats.
From the masters of suspense --- especially Alfred Hitchcock --- Shyamalan borrows the technique of making insignificant detail glimmer with future possibilities. His brother's ability to hit the baseball vast distances, son Morgan's asthma, daughter Bo's paranoia regarding the water she drinks --- though all this is introduced in throwaway fashion, you sense a larger significance.
It is after this that Shyamalan the storyteller and Shyamalan the director lose touch with each other.
Is this a morality play? Is this about Hess losing faith because of a personal tragedy, and then finding it in the face of a more global threat? If yes, the director does not explore this part of the story, does not flesh out the dilemma Hess faces, does not delve into the labyrinths of his mind. We know his wife died. That he, therefore, lost faith in God. That he does not like being called Father any more. And that, when his son is saved, he recovers his faith again.
Is that all there is to it? Does a man of God lose faith the first time he stubs his toe on the brick of Fate? And recover it just as easily? For us, to buy into the dilemma of the protagonist, to empathise, the director needed to flesh it out.
He doesn't --- so we don't.
The big scene, for this part of the story, is set at a dinner table. As the world outside battles the aliens, the Hess household settles down for a favourite meal --- a last supper of sorts. There is a pause as the family members wait for grace to be said, and Gibson fails to oblige. This sparks a confrontation between son and father, that is supposed to fill in the moral blanks.
Makes you wonder --- why at this point? It is six months since the death of the wife; six months since Hess lost his faith. Is this the first meal the family is having together since then? The first time grace was not said? The scene stands out --- not for its impact, but for its bad conception and placement. Surely a more logical device could have been invented to show how far Gibson has slipped?
The other thread is the alien invasion. What invasion? There is the constant natter on television. There is one sighting. And there is the climax, when one of the aliens breaks into the Gibson household and puts the son at risk. Nowhere, here, is the feeling of the earth at risk --- substitute an ordinary killer for an alien, and the story would work just as well. Or as badly.
This, in turn, brings up the biggest logical flaw in the story. Remember the lines. 'I had the blues...Cause I had no shoes...Till I met on the street...A man with no feet'? Which, supposedly, teaches you that a greater misfortune will make a lesser one easier to stomach? Try flipping that on its head --- the man with no feet is going down the street when he sees a man with no footwear. And he thinks ah, thank god, if I had feet I, too, would have had to go around without shoes.
Ridiculous? Not more ridiculous than expecting the audience to believe that the whole world is under threat, that it could be taken over by aliens, that life as we know it could end. And that against this backdrop, the audience is supposed to care whether one man puts his priestly collar back on, or no.
Hell, if the doomsday scenario the director paints actually comes to pass, there won't be a church for Gibson to go back to --- so why the hell should we care whether there is one priest more, or less?
Worse is the fact that by keeping the larger action --- humankind 's titanic fight for survival --- entirely off the screen, the sense of foreboding he seeks to evoke does not come through.
The storyline contains logical flaws large enough to drive an entire invasion fleet through. To cite one: the director, playing a vet who was responsible for the death of Hess' wife, imprisons an alien inside his cellar. In that scene, and in later scenes that show the Hess household barricading itself behind wooden boards, we are led to believe that the alien invaders cannot pass through wood or break it down (and they expect to take over the world? Pshaw!)
How, then, did the immured alien break free in the climax, and enter the house to capture the son?
Or take the climax itself. Early in the story, there is a scene where the alien is suggested to possess superhuman speed and strength. In a trice, he...it... scales a 10-foot wall and climbs onto the roof; in less than a trice it jumps back down and eludes two human beings, one of them an athlete.
Guess what! In the climax, the alien stands still and lets the same human being smash it to bits with a baseball bat, said human taking his own time setting himself up for each swing.
Shyamalan obviously admires the classical style of filmmaking, characterised by a meticulous build up of each scene. Thus, he slows the pace down until it is almost at a standstill --- but in the process, he ends up telegraphing pretty much every punch he throws.
To again cite an instance: there is the scene where Hess goes into the vet's house, comes upon the locked cellar door, then applies his eye to the crack between door and floor, trying for a glimpse of the alien. He sees nothing. He then picks up a sharp knife and slides it under the door, hoping to use it as a mirror to see what is inside the room. Nothing. So he gets up and walks away down the corridor. Pauses. Then comes back and gets down on the floor for another peak. By then, you are fidgeting --- you know the scene has to end with a sighting, and you wish the director would get it over with and move on.
You can see signs of the director's skill --- the film is well textured, the scenes and shots nicely composed; the throwaway humour is exquisite (my personal favorite is Hess, a man of god who does not know how to curse, being asked to; being told to imagine he is insane with anger and to rush out cursing and making a huge noise --- and Hess, taking a deep breath, then running out yelling, 'I am insane with anger!').
Acting-wise, the two kids, Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, are the stars; Cherry Jones as a local cop is the scene-stealer; and Phoenix has his moments as the brother. Against that, there is Gibson --- the quintessential tough guy asked to play against type, and reduced to wooden ponderousness as a substitute for emoting. Shyamalan, who plays the vet, looks so uncomfortable that you realise why his idol, Hitchcock, preferred to be fleetingly seen, never heard, in his own films.
The technical cast delivers --- James Newton Howard's music, Tak Fujimoto's camera, Larry Fulton's sets and Barbara Tulliver's cutting are close to flawless.
In the final analysis, it all boils down to the story itself --- what there is of it. It could have been a great morality play. It could have been scintillating sci-fi. It could have been seat-edge suspense. It attempts to be and do all of the above --- and ends up falling between too many stools.
In a Newsweek story hailing Shyamalan as the next Spielberg, a tangential anecdote talks of how he and New York University classmate Bhavna went to a Chinese restaurant. At the end of the meal, she opened her fortune cookie --- and found, inside, Shyamalan's proposal of marriage.
She said yes.
Had he, in this film, surprised the audience half as skillfully, perhaps we would have said yes, too.
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