Subhash K Jha turns the spotlight on Mel Gibson’s Signs which released 23 years ago.
Okay, so there’s something out there. But what about down here? We pine to feel something more than simulated terror, something more vital and exhilarating as we watch our own M. Night Shyamalan—Manoj, to us natives who want to claim him to be one of us—take on the other- world for the third time.
To refresh weak memories, Manoj started with a blinding bang in The Sixth Sense ,that clever little concoction about a boy who can see the dead , and the man , Bruce Willis. Then came Unbreakable. Bigger though not better. Though it didn’t create the same tehelka at the international boxoffice, in many vital ways it was a deeper more thoughtful film than the much vaunted debut. In Unbreakable, Shyamalan got to question the very basis of existence as the sole survivor of a train accident(Bruce Willis again) lived his life backwards after coming out unscathed in a devastating accident.
There’s no Bruce Willis in Signs. And that, according to me, isn’t a good sign. It means the whole of Hollywood wants to work with our Shyamalan (Manoj) and he’s going to take on the glamour brigade one by one. After Willis, it’s the blue-eyed wonder-boy Gibson. Next it might be Brad Pitt, or —shudder shudder!—Vin Diesel, depending on how high Manoj wants to go.
Fortunately for Shyamalan (Manoj, if you will) the change at the top doesn’t topple over his supernatural equilibrium. Gibson is a fine replacement for Willis. As a grieving widower in Pennsylvania trying to protect his farming family from an alien invasion, his ocean-blue eyes don’t only express his character’s questioning and searching attitude to the whole dilemma of existence, but also represent our collective conscience put under maximum strain in these times.
It’s amazing how much depth Gibson brings to an otherwise visibly low-budget film by just being there. In some sequences such as the one where he begins to tell his two little children how they were born to fob off thought of impending death, Gibson is so correct in his paternal responses t we forget he’s just a superstar masquerading as a brilliant actor.
And while we’re on the performances, full marks to Shyamalan for getting such astonishingly natural performances out of the children in all his films. In Signs little Rory Culkin (the lately legendary Macaulay’s sibling) and Abigail Breslin stare at us and their screen father , with questioning eyes, creating stirring echoes within the audiences’ consciousness.
Some of the film’s most heartwarming sequences feature the two kids. The best moment in the film is when the little girl refuses to part with a precious videotape of her favourite programme when her brother solemnly explains that he needs to tape television news about extra-terrestials because “this is a moment that could change everything that’s been written in science textbooks”.
It’s the way Shyamalan captures the ordinariness of family life caught at an extraordinary juncture which gives Signs a special tonal quality. Most of the time we feel the family’s terror of the unknown more than the terror itself. The editing patterns, almost as mysterious as the footprints in the cornfield , lend a graceful enigma to the narration. Shyamalan introduces furtive flashbacks from Gibson’s past when his wife perished in a fatal car accident and meshes these numbing memories into the theme of atheism that underlines the plot. The director seems to exercise remarkable control over the character’s movements especially towards the end when Gibson and his family wait in the attic either for the ETs to destroy them or to go away. Within a thimble-sized cell Shyamalan conjures a stifling rapidly mutating tension.
This is a film of whispering hints and hissing suggestions. Its one fatal flaw is the post-climactic portion where we actually see an ET on screen trying to poison Gibson’s son as Gibson’s failed brother, Joaquin Phoenix (remember him as the evil Roman in Gladiator), playing a failed baseball player swings his bat at the Spielbergian creature.
Now , this part of the film is certainly amateurish . Until this point in the narration, Shyamalan has staged the terror of an alien invasion by exercising an imaginative persuasion over our minds: news reporters with creased eyebrows on television, a female cop (Cherry Jones) visiting Gibson’s home with unanswerable questions, rattling walls and turning doorknobs. Once the creature is in, the quality of mystique is out. The veil should never have lifted. So far Shyamalan had, in the words of the lady cop, “taken a piss without wetting the front of the pants.” After the ET shows up, the ‘damp’ thing just shows up at the front of the pants.
So does Shyamalan. Show up, I mean. As in his two previous films he writes a role for himself. This time he’s a far more vividly etched character. Shyamalan plays the guy who accidently killed Gibson’s wife. The effort to tie up the tragedy with the cryptic goings-on in the present doesn’t quite hold together. But who are we to complain when so much of the story simply puts the fear of God in our hearts?
The film’s greatest triumph is that it creates a chilling ambience without resorting to conventional cinematic devices . Even the background score by James Newton Howard is muted, though at times it gets overly representational like signs on a road with too many bends and turns.
One more thing. The West has more reason to be devastated by Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamalan’s expositions of the unknown than us down here. We get an alien invasion every three months when a new David Dhawan flick is unleashed in our part of the world.
