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Review by Harvey Karten
3½ stars out of 4
When it comes to creating films with dead-on atmosphere, no-
one, not even Tim Burton, comes close to the vision of M.Night
Shyamalan. In "The Sixth Sense," one of the best movies of
1999, he created the most amazing scene of the year when he
sat Bruce Willis next to Olivia Williams, the latter not having a
clue that her dead husband was sitting just inches from her at a
restaurant while she spoke to herself while conveying to the
audience that she was actually addressing him. Now, with "The
Village," the supernatural element takes a back seat, though
without the creatures of the titled area the picture would have
fallen flat. We're set back to an American hamlet in the year
1897 at a time and place that people (believe it or not) lived
without computers, without cell phones, even with Citarella and
Balducci to buy their food. Could anyone be happy without these
modern miracles? Probably yes, at least, surprisingly enough,
the young people were passionate about their surrounding if their
elders had issues that caused them anguish. In fact we learn
that the communal setup was arranged not by hippie-ish kids or
by groovy adults, but by elders whose friends and relatives had
been victims of crime in the civilized world.
As we observe some three or four dozen characters in this self-
contained village who speak in a strange American tongue
without the use of terms such as "like" and "ya know" and "I
mean," we could easily be instead in the Salem of the 17th
century depicted so well by Arthur Miller's play (and Nicholas
Hytner's dreadful film) "The Crucible." The townspeople did have
their jealousies and animosities much like the folks in Friedrich
Durrenmatt's "The Visit," but instead of burning witches they
stayed away from things that go bump in the night. Specifically,
the village fear was of forest creatures with whom the folks have
an unspoken truce: you don't bother us and we won't wander into
the forbidden woods. When the village idiot, actually the
emotionally disturbed Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), wanders into
the verboten area to pick some red berries, the creatures send a
warning: a red line, a forward slash on the doors of the houses,
which clearly means "we'll forgive you this time, but don't make
the same mistake again." Oh yes, they also eviscerated an
animal, stripping it of its coat like expert furriers.
Essentially two generations lived in the village: the elders such
as the spokesperson, Edward Walker (William Hurt); the woman
he "had feelings for" but would not express them, Alice Hunt
(Sigourney Weaver); the bombastic August Nicholson (Brendan
Gleeson); the woman with stories of her youth, Mrs. Clack
(Cherry Jones). The younger generation to whom the villagers
would pass on the traditions include Walker's blind daughter, Ivy
(Bryce Dallas Howard); the mentally unbalanced or autistic Noah
Percy (Adrien Brody); the strong, silent Lucius Hunt (Joaquin
Phoenix); and others.
If you were the generation that represented the future, would
you be content to live as they did–the women and children taking
five days to spin enough linen on a wheel to make a single shirt,
the single suit you'd wear on Sunday after spending the week in
a yellow, hooded cloak? Instead of McDonald's, you'd live off the
livestock on the land? Who knows? Looking back, maybe a
weekend in a cabin would be fine, but for a lifetime? No way.
Think again. If you never have the amenities we take for granted
today, might you not prefer to splendid discipline of the children in
the school taught by Edward Walker, the togetherness of the
commune, dining together instead of the current custom of
grabbing bites between jobs or on the way to the movies, the
absence of obscenities, hip-hop, and crime?
There is one attempted murder, however, which results in the
town's sending for medicine in the town at the other end of the
woods the one person whom the creatures would presumably not
harm because she is blind. As this chosen woman, Bryce Dallas
Howard turns in a spectacular debut feature performance which
should put her on the short list of critics' groups giving awards for
just that category. In fact the performances of the entire
ensemble are pretty much perfect, a result, perhaps, of
Shyamalan's boot camp training in which the actors were totally
immersed in the rustic setting of the village, serving dinner family
style, with two cast members named each night to prepare the
evening mill while all shared in the 19th century chores such as
sweeping the porch and burying the dead.
There is one stunning twist that comes toward the conclusion,
one that may not be as surprising as Haley Joel Osment's "I-
see-dead-people" shtick, but is enough to knock one sock off if
not both. All in all, a character center period drama far more than
a ghost story, a major entry into this year's pictures of mystery
and imagination.
Copyright © 2004 Harvey Karten
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out of 4
