A Series of Writings on Films that I feel are essential for film lovers, coupled with films that are personal to me. Spoilers for those you haven't seen the film
20 years ago the cover of Newsweek proclaimed writer/director M. Night Shyamalan "The Next Spielberg," ahead of his latest film, the alien invasion drama Signs. While many laugh at this proclamation now, considering the rough road Shyamalan's career went down, if you rewind your mind back to 2002 it's not a surprise he gained this moniker. Like Spielberg, Shyamalan was a filmmaker with an seemingly innate understanding of filmmaking language whose made genre films about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, imbued with the kind of sentiment often seen in Spielberg's work. Re-watching Signs, I found it's Shyamalan's most Spielbergian film, the closest to a modern day Close Encounters of the Third Kind in that both are intimate family dramas in disguise as alien arrival stories. While I'd argue Unbreakable is his best film, Signs is the one closest to my heart. This may sound funny but Signs was an important film for me on my journey as a cinephile. I think this was the first film I analyzed on a filmmaking level, where I started to think about shot composition and framing. I know you're laughing but hey, I was 13.
Signs centers around the Hess family: Graham (Mel Gibson), a former priest who left the church after his wife was killed after being hit by a car, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a failed Minor League baseball player, and Graham's two children, Bo (Abigail Breslin) and Morgan (Rory Culkin). They all live on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and one morning they wake up to discover a crop circle in their corn field. Things get stranger when an intruder is seen on the property and lights appear in the sky over Mexico. While there are several other characters present in the film, including police officer Caroline Paski (Cherry Jones) and Ray Reddy (Shyamalan), the man who killed Graham's wife Colleen (Patricia Calmeber), the story is told through the eyes of the Hesses. Shyamalan eventually leaves behind the other characters, isolating the Hesses. This is similar to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, where Hitchcock also isolates Melanie Daniels and The Brenner family by the film's end. Also, when the Hesses board up their house is a direct reference to The Birds' climax.
As I mentioned earlier, Shyamalan as innate filmmaking sense. There's a preciseness to his compositions and camera movement. There's a Kubrickian feel to this shot:
And the way the camera pans to the knife, foregrounding it, is funny and tense in exactly the right way.
I also love the reveal of the alien still being in the house at the end through the TV screen
Coming back to Spielberg, the scene where the Hesses are using a walkie-talkie to hear the aliens talking is perhaps the most Spielbergian in the film:
The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were films about coming to accept the incredible, whether it be the ability of a young boy being able to see ghosts, or that you're a superhero. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), at first doubts that Cole Seer (Haley Joel Osment) can see ghosts, realizes he's telling the truth after discovering his former patient had the same ability. David Dunn (Willis again), comes to accept he has superhuman powers. In Signs, Graham eventually can't deny there are aliens ready to invade. These films are about faith and belief, as well as accepting your purpose- Cole as the helper of the deceased, David as a superhero vigilante. Shyamalan takes these themes further in Signs by having Graham not just realize these aliens are real but there's a greater design to the universe, something he may have once believed in but turned his back on after his wife was killed. In perhaps Signs' best scene, Graham tells Merrill that there are two groups of people: people who see those lights in the sky and think they're seeing a miracle; the other believe that whether good or bad, there's no higher power looking out for them.
I think Gibson gives what may be the best performance of his career in this film. Like with Willis, Shyamalan casts Gibson against type as a non-confrontational former priest who can't swear convincingly. When Graham and Merrill are attempting to scare off the intruder Graham awkwardly says "I'm losing my mind." It's hard not to imagine Gibson having fun playing a guy *pretending* to lose his mind rather than genuine loose cannons like Martin Riggs and Mad Max. This role also allows Gibson to be the most emotionally vulnerable he's been since the first two Lethal Weapon movies. There's a scene where Graham encounters Ray, whose trapped an alien in his house and leaving for a safer place, in which her tells Graham he's sorry for the pain he caused him. Gibson's reaction to that-the pain, the anger, but the acceptance of Ray's apology, displays how stronh he can be as actor. Overall it's a great movie star performance and perhaps the last time Gibson was without baggage as an actor/star.
Instead of casting another huge movie star as Merrill Shyamalan went for a more offbeat choice with Phoenix. Phoenix was coming off his first Oscar nomination for Gladiator and Walk the Line was a few years down the road. This was the film that turned me in to a Phoenix fan. He's so funny here. His reaction to the alien walking across the TV screen and the image of him sitting with the children, all of them wearing tinfoil hats, is likely the funniest thing Shyamalan has put on screen. Merrill is sort of a loser but he's got a good heart and is pretty endearing. I love that when Graham asks Merrill if he believes in miracles Merrill tells of the time he avoided being vomited on a girl he wanted to kiss because he had to take a piece of gum out. This is the same scene where Graham outlines the two groups of people and Shyamalan really gives us a good sense of how these two guys approach life. Gibson and Phoenix don't look a thing like brothers but I really enjoy their chemistry.
Coming back to the themes of faith and belief, Shyamalan's twist ending her- along with the Village- is his most audacious conceptually and thematically. I remember when I first the saw Signs I was expecting a twist along the lines of The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, more of an "Oh my God!" than a slow realization of what has been set up over the course of the film. Shyamalan is going less for shock than for quiet realization. Bo's leaving glasses of water around for various reasons (supposed contamination, tastes funny), Morgan's asthma, Merrill's bat hanging in the living room, and Colleen's final words to Graham about telling Merrill to swing away, are all part of a grand design, calling back to Graham's question, "What if there are no coincidences?" Morgan's asthma protects him from the aliens' poisons and the glasses of water kill the aliens. Graham's faith is restored and the final shot shows him months later getting ready to go to church. He's found his purpose again. I find the ending I find little too pat. If Shyamalan had made things more ambiguous regarding whether certain things were coincidental or not it would've provided some great discussion. Instead, there's not much room for questioning these things. If we're going to continue the Spielberg comparisons, it's the kind of easy ending for which, Spielberg often gets criticized.
Ultimately, I don't think Signs is a particularly deep movie but I still think the movie overall works on an emotional and technical level. After using Eduardo Serra on Unbreakable as his cinematographer, Shyamalan brought back his The Sixth Sense cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (who photographed no less than Terrence Malick's debut feature Badlands as well as The Silence of the Lambs) for Signs. Fujimoto bring an eerily cozy feel to the film, the same way he did with The Sixth Sense. There's a paradoxical cold and warmth to these early Shyamalan films. James Newton Howard's elegant and elegiac scores also bring a beautiful autumnal melancholy this film and Shyamalan's other work. There's a little bit of Danny Elfman too in Howard's main theme for Signs. If not for Shyamalan's name you'd be forgiven if you thought maybe you were about to watch a Tim Burton alien invasion film.
Like H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds and its cinematic interpretations, the aliens are defeated pretty easily at the end of story, which I'm okay with because the story isn't really about a war against aliens. It's a home invasion thriller which just happens to be set against a backdrop of a world invasion. The Birds, which I referenced earlier is also a smaller, almost apocalyptic story that's focused on this small town and its inhabitants. Shyamalan goes even smaller than Hitchcock, creating an almost chamber drama feel to the certain parts of the film. I almost wish there no other characters in the film other than the Hesses.
The next Spielberg moniker obviously didn't stick, with The Village getting mostly negative reviews and Shyamalan getting worse and worse reviews over the next several films, though he's made a comeback or the last several years. However, I don't think Shyamalan has ever recaptured what made people deem him the heir to Spielberg. The specific atmosphere of his early work has never completely returned for me unfortunately. Still, Shyamalan has always stayed true to his own particular sensibilities, similar to George Lucas, who's also gone through a reappraisal regarding his specific quirks. Maybe because we're at a place where pop culture lacks vision and spark it's easier to appreciate people like Shyamalan more now. Signs, along with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and yes, The Village, represent a filmmaker unafraid of being laughed at for his earnestness, whose pretentiousness oddly feels like genuine sincerity.
It's weird to think of Signs as a 20 year old film but it makes sense- it does feel like a film from another era, a star and director driven blockbuster, the kind that would feel like a throwback if released now. I never know how to end these things so I'll say that despite it losing some of its luster for me over the years, I still think Signs is a beautiful, if somewhat reductive, film, which represents a filmmaker who at the time seemed unstoppable as a pop culture force, even if calling him the next Spielberg ended up being a curse. So, what are your thoughts on Signs and M. Night Shyamalan's career. Comment and let me know.
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