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UNBREAKABLE
8/10
US
2000
dir M Night Shyamalan
cin
Eduardo Serra
stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson, Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat
Clark
107 min
Unbreakable is a movie quite unlike any other major-studio Hollywood
film of the year 2000 – though this strangeness seems to have been taken,
somewhat oddly, for granted. It’s also, arguably, the best. That doesn’t
mean it’s flawless – Shyamalan’s a control freak, unsuccessfully trying
to mask his immaturities and weaknesses with dazzling technique. But hios
movie does simultaneously entertain, absorb, challenge and fascinate,
even though many may well (short-sightedly) dismiss it as ludicrous.
David
Dunn (Willis) is a security guard who emerges the sole survivor from a
terrible train crash: unscathed, unbruised - unbreakable? He’s contacted
by Elijah (Jackson), a brittle-boned comic-book dealer who claims to know
the secret of his miraculous survival... From a remarkably original (and
simple) premise, the story unfolds with a refreshing solemnity - a stately,
almost lugubrious sobriety. Perhaps it does start to falter around the
half-way mark, as if Shyamalan wasn’t sure where he wanted to head, but
there’s something exhilarating about the way he navigates this tricky
territory - Dunn starts getting some jolting, Dead Zone-ish premonitions,
visions given the apt twist of looking like closed-circuit security-camera
footage.
Such
touches are typical of Shyamalan’s consistently impressive direction The
compositions and camera movements show a Kubrick-like level of control
– restrained bravura. Everything is subtly colour co-ordinated, with Jackson’s
wardrobe of mauves and purples especially delightful. Shyamalan blends
Kubrick’s precision with a Hitchcockian desire to ‘put the audience through
it,’ to manipulate them at every step of the way. The low-key music echoes
Bernard Herrman; Shyamalan pops up in a wrong-footing cameo; an early
hospital shot from Willis’s perspective quotes The Birds.
Hitchcock
never wrote his own scripts, of course, and this is where Shyamalan stumbles
a little. He ear for dialogue is occasionally tinny (“There are two reasons
why I’m looking at you like this,” says a medic early on), and some aspects
of the story remain fuzzy, notably Dunn’s water aversion, while
there’s too much emphasis on the ‘mysterious’ car crash which brought
Dunn and his wife (Wright Penn) together. Examined rationally, the twist
ending makes no sense, for reasons which can’t be spelled out for fear
of spoiling the plot. The film builds an powerful, lingering atmosphere,
but, as we think back over the developments, we start snagging on countless
loose ends and gaping holes.
The
implausibilities may be too much for many viewers - but perhaps, as with
David Fincher’s The Game, they actually elevate the movie to a
new level. The ending isn’t realistic, but it makes perfect
sense in terms of the movie’s comic-book framework, and its central idea
that an individual may attempt to make sense of his place in the world
by means of a powerful (though bastardised) medium, halfway between art
and commerce. Comic-books – or, we may infer, cinema. The finale suggests
that, as with Hitchcock’s best pictures, Unbreakable is perhaps
intended as a very deadpan kind of black comedy, one in which the humour
remains tantalisingly close to the surface, but always latent. It’s usually
laughable when a director ends a fictional movie with ‘what happened next’
captions, but Shyamalan pulls it off, partly thanks to Jackson’s astonishing,
subdued, heartbreaking/terrifying delivery of his final line, partly due
to the way the ensuing caption is so marvellously right for those comic-book
traditions.
It’s
important to stress that Unbreakable isn’t really a complex film.
Like its main character, It takes a single theme – inversion – and obsesses
over it: applies it to the movement of its camera, constantly reversing
or inverting the image, like images onto film, like images onto the human
eye. Attentive viewers will spot (via a glimpsed newspaper cutting) that
the maiden name of David’s wife is Audrey Inverso – it’s no accident that
this name sounds like one of the Fantastic Four. But that’s about as far
as Shyamalan wants to go – there’s no epecially intricate deeper meaning.
Such a reading would be out of place in what is not, really, an intellectual
film. It’s a movie. Shyamalan tells an unusual, strikingly original story
– and that’s it. He takes mainstream cinema about as far as it can go,
as far as it can go before it starts being something else. Perhaps he’ll
never strike so lucky again. Who cares? Unbreakable is a film that the vast majority of today’s directors,
whether arthouse or mainstream, may never match. Shyamalan included.
5th Jan 2001
by Neil
Young
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