It's not exactly easy to become an infamously "bad" director. Most of the time, to be known as a maker of convoluted catastrophes or droning bores, you have to be noticeably talented in some way and -- for lack of a better word -- misuse that unique ability to make compromised products. For all his one-dimensional, hugely false depictions of war and the military, Michael Bay possesses tremendous skill to orchestrate product-placement free-for-alls masquerading as explosive, action-driven bonanzas like the Transformers films. He may have less than zero scruples when it comes to the material but the filmmaker has an eye for building and, to an extent, cutting towering set-pieces that would be wrong to dismiss as simple or easy.
M. Night Shyamalan is a different breed from Bay altogether, but he suffers from the same stigma. In 1999, Shyamalan directed The Sixth Sense, a whip-smart, stylish supernatural thriller that caught on at the box office like wildfire; he followed that film up with Unbreakable, a bold, before-its-time examination of the mythology of heroes and villains told through a patient, innovative origins story. The passable Signs followed, but things didn't start getting groan-worthy until The Village and Lady in the Water, which both suffered from being overwrought, to say the least.
What has followed has been a string of increasingly nonsensical science fiction jaunts, but his abilities as a filmmaker are still quite apparent. This goes double for Wayward Pines, an interesting but extremely bloated and overthought mini-series that Shyamalan produced and partially directed, and I thought I'd take this chance to go through a few of Shyamalan's more distinct missteps as a filmmaker, one's that have especially diluted and hampered his distinct imagery and visual rhythms. And to be fair, I will be posting a similar list of his greatest moments as a director on Wednesday as part of the wind up to the premiere of Wayward Pines.
The Last Airbender
There are certain experiences, both good and bad, that simply cannot be put into words, like the view from Mt. Everest or the first time you see the ocean. Those examples would likely lead the good list and, though it would be more towards the bottom, any list of the bad would have to include M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of the popular animated series The Last Airbender. One could parse all the bad decisions that went into this out-and-out disaster, from the bevy of shrug-worthy creature designs to the inexplicable dialogue to the alarmingly wrong-headed thematic concerns of tradition, theology, race, and family, but that really doesn’t explain it. Let’s just say that Shyamalan’s storytelling ambitions, though arguably admirable, completely detonate what should have been a swish of a franchise. The end result is an extravagant failure for the ages, one that can stand toe-to-toe with the very worst of ‘em.
Will Smith & Jaden Smith in After Earth
There’s a convincing argument to be made that without Will Smith and his son, Shyamalan’s last feature simply wouldn’t have been made. For many, that would have been just fine, but there are some fascinating elements to Shyamalan’s wonky father-son tale. Visually, the film is occasionally striking in its framing of landscapes, the sense of texture in the environs, wardrobes, and sets, and a personal take on fatherhood that felt convincing more times than not.
Of course, the script’s predictable trajectory renders much of this middling, but it’s on the film’s two stars that the film hinges and ultimately fails. Here we have a major star with a very distinct perspective on life starring in a film where his character must give constant advice to his son, who just so happens to be played by his star-in-the-making son. It has the makings of a highly personal film, at least for the Smiths, but the tone of the characters felt in the dialogue, to say nothing of Smith Sr.’s militaristic delivery, feel utterly feigned. The “ghosting” aspect is especially alarming, as the film’s overall feel-no-fear rhetoric makes the father-son relationship feel ruled by beliefs, both spiritual and political, rather than intimate, painful experience. This is all ignoring the fact that the elder Smith spends nearly the entire film spouting nonsense while sitting on his ass.
The American Express Commercial
Though not a movie, it still bears mentioning. As far as heartless marketing goes, American Express has a relatively inventive, if egregiously boastful track record. They had that pretty fantastic Wes Anderson advertisement, and then there’s the classic Superman and Jerry Seinfeld commercial. Among the hash is this one helmed and focused on Shyamalan, having a late drink at a small bistro where he imagines all sorts of eerie whatsits. Unlike Anderson’s piece, which demonstrated the very real usefulness of credit on film shoots, Shyamalan dreams up clever creatures and small scenarios but doesn’t connect them at all. In essence, this is everything wrong with Shyamalan’s art form: eerie story concepts and creatures galore but only the faintest sense of personal reflection. The fact that the piece ends with a fan gushing over his work while he tries to return to his nightmarish visions is the pompous cherry on top.
The End of The Village
As I get into further in the discussion of Shyamalan’s better attributes, The Village is a scary, lively movie upended by an uprooting of subtext in the film’s utterly false and hugely delusive final twist. The film follows a community of fearful, Shaker-like people who are ruled over by a gathering of red-clad, scaly monsters that occasionally creep into the community to collect their due. Even before the final reveal - which, for the record, makes no sense whatsoever – the story is a classic vision of how fear is utilized to hem in ambition, curiosity, and daring, and how the repression of time is also the repression of progress. In effect, Shyamalan’s final scene and cameo is a condescending and deeply cheapening round of beating a dead horse, one that has beget similar pestering tricks that are now become part and parcel of his style.
The Climax of The Lady in the Water
The Lady in the Water remains Shyamalan’s greatest oddity, a maddeningly scattershot and ineptly reflexive story of the power of community held together only by Paul Giamatti’s dutiful performance and DP Christopher Doyle’s magnificent lensing. The winking self-awareness is a far bigger problem here than at the end of The Village, and his tonal control is completely lacking. There are parts of The Lady in the Water that are genuinely wacky, butting up against meticulous scenes of suspense and curious bouts of human drama.
I could deliver a harangue about his vainly self-serving depiction of Bob Balaban’s naïve yet nefarious critic, but that’s been done several times already and it’s frankly not the real problem here. The real problem is the strain of uneasy sentimentalism and unwieldy earnestness that runs throughout the film and culminates in the climactic scene where Giamatti’s handy man must bring Bryce Dallas Howard’s not-mermaid back to life. The music and the immense sadness evoked by Giamatti are simply at odds with the rest of the calamitous nonsense that Shyamalan propagates throughout his film, an annoying streak of self-seriousness in a story that is constantly, seemingly purposefully undermining its importance.