THE VILLAGE (2004) A mismanagement of a good setup and payoff M. Night Shayamalan's movies have, up until now, been for the most part getting better and better, though the endings were getting worse and worse (maybe why Unbreakable is my favorite so far). The Village continues the trend with the endings. Its story is built around a concept that is clever and creative, and yet so fabulously foolish and short-sighted that it begs for a very different movie to be made around it, perhaps one that wasn't made by someone who has unintentionally but so inevitably coached his audiences into doing their damnedest to anticipate how he's going to pull the rug out from under them in the third act. If you speculate long enough, you're going to hit on the right idea with this one soon enough, though no big hints are dropped until there's thirty-five minutes to go (to the contrary, one early hint flatly belies what we are later to learn). In the deep-woods village of Covington where the pleasures are simple (slipping frogs into girls' hands, whacking people with sticks) and so are the punishments (the Quiet Room), the rustic villagers have a contract with the beasties who live in the forest - we don't go into the woods, and you don't come into the village. The village elders (William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson) are content in the village; the youths (Joaquim Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, Adrian Brody) are a little more curious, but cautious, since the beasties leave occasional, gruesome reminders that they shouldn't be messed with, and make creepy trumpeting howls from far out there. That's really about it; The Village is basically a clash of generations, and it wouldn't make for much of a movie if the youths buckled under and stayed inside the whole time. Despite a lot of pretty bad dialogue (too often a hackneyed attempt at 19th Century English as filtered through mid-20th Century historical epics), the performances are good throughout, with the appropriate overtones of emotional/sexual repression, budding womanhood, and clueless young people trying to figure out what love is. Brody makes for a good mentally handicapped madman (or something like that), and Howard as a blind girl is playful, perceptive, and irrepressibly charming, if not always convincingly blind. I would have liked to have seen exactly how Phoenix fended off the declarations of love from a young woman who seems to be channelling Anne Shirley. As a clash of generations, it's pretty one-sided; the behavior of the parents (which seems merely superstitious and overcautious at first) is revealed to be so stupefyingly selfish and wilfully naïve that a better movie would've ensured that the audience's inevitable anger at this hogwash ending would be directed at the parents, instead of the movie itself. The conflict hardly happens at all after a point; the young ones at the end of this movie learn nothing from the failings of their parents, and might not even remember there was a conflict in the first place, much less what it was about. After its Big Reveal, The Village ends abruptly with a "reset button", as if nothing happened. I'm not sure if things would be improved if The Village had been set a few generations later - or if the village had been settled a few generations earlier - as it would inevitably have been a pretty different movie, but it would have had to have answered a few hard-to-avoid questions, which The Village as it is avoids. Shyamalan's proved all he's ever going to need to prove in terms of knock-your-socks-off surprise endings; Unbreakable's was good, The Sixth Sense's was great. The Village doesn't much fit with its own, and does not seem to be made with the understanding that the elders have done something incredibly foolish, and it is repeatedly the young - from the movie's opening funeral to its closing sick bed - who pay the price. BACK TO THE V's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE