Mother more compelling than shrink

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 1999)

Coming into Sixth Sense I expected a movie about a boy who sees dead people while those around him don't, and the shrink who tries to help him. That was as much as I had allowed myself to absorb.
Osment's performance as isolated little Cole, whose only anchor is his mother, was quite touching. Osment's stillness for the camera, his prolonged moments of gravity and wide-eyed stares served as acute counterpoints to his contemporaries' careless, energetic tumblings. The lingering shots on Osment's smallest twitch and occasional tear-welling eyes allowed his talent to shine through wonderfully . He has remarkable control. I don't know if I say this in light of the fact that he's a child, or regardless of the fact that he's a child.
I found Cole's relationship with his mother to be much more compelling than Cole's relationship with Malcolm Crowe (Willis). The most real moments for me were those in which Cole's mother brushes past inexplicable manifestations of Cole's affliction/curse/gift -- when she senses something out-of-the-ordinary and yet refuses to acknowledge them, perhaps because to do so would be to brand Cole as the freak that his peers accuse him of being. These moments of almost-acknowledgment made me wonder how I would react to proof of something outside of science, something that common sense tells me shouldn't be possible, shouldn't be happening, but is. This is the underlying ambition of a lot of scary movies; Sixth Sense succeeds in raising this what-if question more than any other offering in the same genre that I've seen in the last couple of years. The first instance is when Cole's mother leaves the kitchen for an instance only to return to find every single one of the kitchen drawers and cabinets opened and pulled out, and Cole sitting with his hands plastered to the kitchen table. No sound had been made in her absence; there was no way Cole could have pulled that stunt by himself, and no discernible reason for him to do so even if he could. So what could have happened? Cole's mother deflects any possibility of supernatural agents by saying, "Baby, were you looking for something?" To which Cole mumbles "Pop tarts."
On the flip side of love and protectiveness, Cole, in his turn, seeks to protect his mother from what he perceives as his curse, his freakishness. Cole's deep love and feelings of protectiveness towards his mother mirror her feelings towards him but with a much different impact coming from a young and vulnerable child. Osment's portrayal of adult responsibilities in a small, fragile package, his taking over, in a weird way, of the parenting role with his mother, made him an even more sympathetic character.
Willis as Malcolm Crowe. Perhaps it's me bringing my baggage of Willis from his days in Moonlighting (tv series) and his action flicks (Die Hard, Armageddon etc.) but Willis' face is forever associated with a little half-quirk of the lips and a twinkle in the eyes, or a kick-ass frown and smirk. Willis playing the pensive psychiatrist just came across to me as wooden. It was very quiet, very still, but not very confidence-inspiring. I didn't buy Cole's gradual conversion to Crowe from his initial sprint to the church to his eventual heartfelt confessions.
Having Cole come to resolution with his curse/gift through the guidance of Crowe made sense in that Cole's mother was unable to acknowledge her son's difference, but it was not altogether convincing. Nevertheless, a REALLY good movie, and one that made me hide my eyes until the ghosts were gone.