546: The Village

[00:00:01] Let's get to The Village from 2004, which is written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

[00:00:11] Stars Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, Adrian Brody, Brendan Gleeson, Cherry Jones.

[00:00:20] And the synopsis is, a series of events test the beliefs of a small, isolated countryside village.

[00:00:31] Firstly, I will be doing, hopefully in the next couple of months, a M. Night Shyamalan specific premium podcast collection,

[00:00:40] doing his most recent seven or eight movies, so keep an eye out for that.

[00:00:44] But I figured this wouldn't be in that group of movies, so might as well cover it here, and it's more Halloween-y, spooky kind of stuff anyways.

[00:00:55] I got to this one fairly late. I don't think I saw it for the first time until maybe the mid-2010s.

[00:01:04] Spoiler warning, because even though it is 20 years old, the ending does change the whole perspective of the movie, if you haven't seen it yet.

[00:01:14] So, fair warning.

[00:01:16] This would be about my second favorite, third favorite Shyamalan film, with Split being my favorite as of now.

[00:01:27] I know that this one is fairly polarizing, as many M. Night Shyamalan movies are, largely because of the twist.

[00:01:36] And on M. Night Shyamalan, he is one of the most inconsistent filmmakers in Hollywood, I would say.

[00:01:45] He has some really high highs, like Split, Signs, The Village, and then he has really low lows, like The Last Airbender or After Earth.

[00:01:58] Nevertheless, though, I appreciate that he always tells original stories.

[00:02:03] Like, the worlds he presents are the things that he came up with.

[00:02:08] And sometimes even in his misfires, like Old, for example, I don't love that movie, but I appreciate the ambition and the world that he's trying to flesh out and the ideas he's trying to comment on.

[00:02:22] My main draw watching this was Joaquin Phoenix.

[00:02:28] This was still early on in his career, and he had just been in Gladiator.

[00:02:35] It has some flaws that more so came around this last rewatch, actually, which we'll get to.

[00:02:44] He makes this village feel very authentic.

[00:02:48] I totally buy that this is a sort of pilgrim-esque village, that there are these creatures surrounding them that allows them to not be able to venture out.

[00:02:59] And it's a very sheltered, everybody knows everybody, no outsiders.

[00:03:04] There's some issues that I noticed.

[00:03:09] I don't mind, considering I love history, I don't mind historical films where people talk very properly in a very lavish, over-the-top, almost in a pretentious way sometimes.

[00:03:21] I can get past that very easily.

[00:03:25] And I know one defense of this could be it is a twist, considering it is modern day, so they aren't living in an era that seems to be hundreds of years ago.

[00:03:35] So therefore, they're having to make up their own style or version of the dialogue of the time.

[00:03:41] But nevertheless, just as a casual viewer, I really found the conversations, and maybe it has to do something with the performances as well.

[00:03:53] But sometimes the dialogue just got so goofy.

[00:03:58] And since the elders of the village are the ones who are aware of the ruse, there's not really a reason to have it be so heavy in old-fashioned dialect, if you will.

[00:04:13] If you're not even seeing the outside world anyways, what does it matter?

[00:04:18] It seems like that's honestly more so for us, so we don't question it.

[00:04:23] Which is a little aggravating, not a big deal.

[00:04:26] But I did think about that this last time.

[00:04:31] I know that a lot of people that I talk to about this movie say that the twist ruins it for them in terms of re-watching it.

[00:04:41] Personally, I can get that in a sense.

[00:04:44] But even when I first saw it, I immediately wanted to go back and re-watch it with that context.

[00:04:51] Because what works for me is that the characters that we're following,

[00:04:56] Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, Adrian Brody, they're not at all aware of the real situation.

[00:05:04] What they're feeling, what they're experiencing is completely genuine.

[00:05:11] I also don't mind the name, even though it's a little too much like Harry Potter, considering the time it came out.

[00:05:19] But those we don't speak of, the creatures, I think that's still a clever idea.

[00:05:24] I love the look of the quote-unquote creatures.

[00:05:28] The red cape and hood.

[00:05:31] The almost porcupine-esque bodies.

[00:05:34] I think all that.

[00:05:36] Like when I first saw it, and I didn't know the twist, I bought that that was a true creature.

[00:05:42] And whenever I've re-watched it with someone, they don't seem to question that either.

[00:05:50] Some other design elements.

[00:05:52] For one, the movie looks amazing.

[00:05:54] It's shot by Roger Deakins, one of the best cinematographers ever.

[00:06:00] The yellow cloaks, I love.

[00:06:02] It is one of the most simple but memorable clothing costume choices I've seen in a movie like this maybe ever.

[00:06:10] Like whenever I see that yellow cloak, I'm like, okay, it's the village.

[00:06:13] I know immediately where it's from.

[00:06:16] And whenever a character is wearing it against a very drab, dark background, like when Bryce Dallas Howard is in the woods.

[00:06:24] And the red cloaks too, but the yellow especially.

[00:06:27] It's just so eye-catching.

[00:06:31] Some people say that it makes the characters look like bananas.

[00:06:36] You know, fair enough.

[00:06:37] I guess I can't get that out of my head, but within the context of the movie, absolutely no problems.

[00:06:45] Adrian Brody, I like him in general.

[00:06:48] I think he's a very underrated character actor and he's been in such a wide variety of movies and roles.

[00:06:56] His performance in this, and I don't totally blame him because he's just going off the writing of Shyamalan.

[00:07:05] That character just doesn't totally work for me.

[00:07:08] I think the motivations and the overall behavior and his connection with different things in the story is more frustrating than anything in terms of the convenience of it and how exaggerated.

[00:07:23] I know that there are people like that in the world, but I think that sometimes he goes too far or maybe the camera lingers too much on him to have it feel more grounded as everything else in the movie pretty much is, or at least performance-wise it is.

[00:07:40] One of the more compelling and intense sequences, even knowing the twist, is the third act when Bryce Dallas Howard ventures out into the woods.

[00:07:52] Talking about that logically, pretty stupid.

[00:07:55] Here, let's send a blind girl out into the woods, even though William Hurt is like, oh, she knows the woods better than anyone and she can see better, quote-unquote, than anybody.

[00:08:05] It's just a little, you know, if we're thinking about this in a real situation, no one would send the blind girl to wander the woods at night, even if there weren't actual creatures to terrorize her.

[00:08:21] One strong writing note in terms of the suspense of the myth of the creatures is when, at this point in the story, we know, okay, they're not real.

[00:08:33] But then Adrian Brody goes out in the costume and we think for a moment, oh, wait, they were real.

[00:08:40] Like, there's the fake ones done by the village, but there's also real ones in the woods.

[00:08:47] That's pretty cool.

[00:08:49] There's also a lot of interesting ideas, at least from what I gathered, the idea of fear and you living in a sheltered community because they all did this due to them being traumatized, losing loved ones, witnessing horrible violence,

[00:09:08] and then deciding, okay, we don't want anyone else to die.

[00:09:14] We don't want anyone else that we know and love to experience these horrors of the real world.

[00:09:21] So we're going to keep them in this community.

[00:09:24] But you can still have horror and trauma anywhere.

[00:09:29] For example, Adrian Brody stabbing Joaquin Phoenix.

[00:09:34] Going back to fear, someone saying, okay, this is going to happen to you if you do this.

[00:09:40] There are these people out in the world.

[00:09:42] There are these monsters that will hurt you.

[00:09:45] Don't ever go here.

[00:09:46] And you as a sheltered person, especially as a kid growing up in that community, you're not going to question that.

[00:09:56] The score is very good by James Newton Howard.

[00:10:02] The score is very good by James Newton Howard.

[00:10:32] And thankfully, this one keeps all of that stuff until the last five or ten minutes.

[00:10:37] But the idea of the U.S. government having some kind of agreement with this park to not have any planes flying over,

[00:10:46] that just seems so ludicrous considering this has been decades.

[00:10:50] And you're saying, okay, the U.S. government is still saying this massive environmental area that seems to be right in the middle of the U.S.

[00:11:00] We're not going to have any planes, no helicopters, nothing fly over this just to protect you or because of money or something.

[00:11:09] It is a little okay.

[00:11:10] Okay, like I'll buy it for this, but don't try any harder to explain this because it already sounds quite silly.

[00:11:20] That is a four out of five.