Though Unbreakable still remains my favorite of Shymalan's many directorial efforts, The Sixth Sense may now be a close runner-up for the title of my favorite M. Night Shyamalan motion picture. Sure, everyone talks about the big twist ending (which I won't spoil here but really is well-handled and works as an enhancement of the plot instead of a distraction from it, just like a good twist ending should work) but there's a surprising amount of heart and clever filmmaking in The Sixth Sense that demonstrates how, just three movies into his career, Shyamalan really did have a lot of confidence and craftsmanship in the way he assembled his films.
Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a guy at the top of his field of child psychology with prestigious awards, a hefty paycheck and a lovely wife all by his side. However, his world gets rocked for the worse when a former patient he tried to help as a child returns to his home in the middle of the night as a distributed adult with a loaded firearm. The attack damages Crowe's relationship with his wife and makes him feel less confident in his work as he ponders if he can really help any of the kids he treats. He takes socially and mentally troubled youngster Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) under his wing as a new patient, looking for both some direly needed redemption and help for the troubled kid in the process.
But Cole's issues run deeper than just typical medical conditions. The kid has the unique ailment of being able to see dead people, a condition Malcolm is unaware of for about half of the running time of The Sixth Sense. Prior to that, Shyamalan's screenplay brilliant gathers a ton of tension out of the uncertainty of what exactly is going on with Cole. Strange events (such as a bunch of kitchen cupboards being opened in a short span of time or unexplained claw marks on Cole's back) keep transpiring and their just subdued enough to exist in the more realistic aesthetic The Sixth Sense has established but they're also just bizarre enough to demonstrate that something out of the ordinary is going on with this kid.
It takes a while for the supernatural to appear in The Sixth Sense and when they do, the dead people themselves aren't like typical visual portrayals of ghosts in movies where they're floating or glowing or carry other stylized visual elements, but rather are simply people with one or two notable physical disfigurements that indicate how they perished. It's a clever way to extend the film's more grounded atmosphere from the first half of the story into how it depicts the more heightened elements of its plot. Interestingly, something that also gets carried over throughout the entire movie is playing off Cole's incredible gift to see the dead as something akin to a young child coping with living with a mental disorder rather than a superpower or something similarly stylized.
This is especially true in earlier sequences in the film showing kids mocking him or him causing a disruption in class due to the dead people trying to communicate with him. It's not far-fetched at all to read this as a similar to how a child reacts when trying to live with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or other similar afflictions at a young age. Interestingly, even when the audience and Malcolm Crowe learn that he can literally see ghosts and that that's what is giving him all these problems, the mental illness allegory actually gets strengthened since Cole doesn't end up finding a way to cure himself, rather, he does what people with mental illness do every day; he learns to live with it, manage it and organically weave it into his life. Just like people living with all types of mental disorders, this doesn't mean his ability to see the dead won't ever cause problems in the future but it does demonstrate he can live a fulfilling life even with this unique ability by his side.
That's a brilliant way to ground Cole's struggle and M. Night Shyamalan's screenplay deftly handles the young boy's turmoil with grace that's punctuated by incredibly strong performances by Bruce Willis, Toni Collette (oh man, is she ever great in this as Cole's caring mother) and Haley Joel Osment, the latter of whom really is one of the all-time great child actors. The two are accompanied by a level of thoughtfulness that permeates the best of Shyamalan's work as a filmmaker. In his finest films, the suspenseful and eerie entities that are most unusual tend to find themselves entangled in well-rendered human beings grappling with inner conflicts and problems that run parallel to the more out-there details of the story and The Sixth Sense serves as a fantastic microcosm of that recurring facet of Shyamalan's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment