M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village—frame for frame for frame an exquisite film—is now out on DVD/VHS. Seldom do cinematography, setting, music, writing, and performance meld into transcendent art as they do here.
It is a crime the film wasn’t nominated for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ award for Best Picture, and, as if anyone needed it, conclusive evidence that this academy of men and women who make films have little ability to discern achievement of the true, the good, and the beautiful in their own “art” or “science” or whatever.
If I were to guess at what about The Village disturbs or amuses or embarrasses contemporary American viewers (and, I assume, the academy voters), I would say it is the characters’ immediate availability to each other: their lack of pretense, the spell-binding beauty of the language they use to speak to one another, their depth of genuine commitment, their emotional intelligence and emotional, um, articulateness seem unreal or contrived and, thus, to our jaded senses, humorous and clunky. This is how persons who bear the image of God—who understand that other persons are bearers of the divine image—ought to address other persons and ought to behave toward them.
The dialogue, acting, and camera work are often radiant, directed, with at times piercing insight, toward a portrayal of its characters’ humanity. With his camera and with the physical presences and faces of his actors, writer-director Shyamalan makes art of the simplest things: running through an open, sunlit field or (a powerful, recurring theme here, often in slow motion) taking the hand of a beloved.
When I saw the film in a theater last summer, I noticed several audience members laughing at moments of intense emotional honesty in communication. In this age of invasive technology, constant distraction, and (thus) ubiquitous triviality, real intimacy, depth of feeling, and simple-yet-profound speech seem clumsy or hokey or, I suppose, even false. I’d wager that for many viewers human communion at the level portrayed in the film is impossible to grasp or believe and if possible it must (by today’s way of thinking) be manufactured or imposed.
The performances from William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, and Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of director/actor Ron Howard) are brilliant in their humility, their embrace of limitation, and their availability to grace. I can see why accomplished actors are willing to take risks with this director and his out-of-the-ordinary scripts. The words he gives them to speak and the characters he draws are so beautiful and strangely defying of contemporary expectations. The film is quirky (all of his films are), evoking a world at once alien and recognizable, but manages to summon empathy for these odd-yet-beautiful people and the wondrous reality they inhabit, all in the interest of telling a good, honest story worthy of love. As William Hurt’s character says in a pivotal moment, “The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.”
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