Village Idiocy--Spoilers

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2004)

"The Village" is the story of a small community established by big-city escapees beyond a forest inhabited by evil creatures. The village elders have taken an oath never to return to "the towns," ruled by evil ostensibly worse than the dangers posed by the bloody-thirsty forest creatures.
Edward Walker (William Hurt) leads the community and looks after his wife and two daughters, one of whom is blind. Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) is the village's dreamer, an inexplicably reserved young man intent on some day walking through the woods and whose heart pines in reticent silence for Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), Edward Walker's blind daughter. The conflict is triggered by the feelings that Noah Percy (Adrien Brody) holds for Ivy. Noah, however, is the village's "emotionally challenged" character (okay, he is the village idiot), whose feelings Ivy would never reciprocate. When a marriage is arranged between Ivy and Lucius, Noah's jealousy precipitates a tragedy unlike any experienced previously in the village. The situation requires someone from the village to travel to "the towns" through the creature-infested forest.
The film's trailer builds up to a jolt, but the film delivers only a light zap from a defective hand-held prank buzzer. If the dark, drab tones in which the film was shot do not bore you enough, there's plenty of bad dialogue to make you groan yourself out of shyamalanesque stupor.
The film's narrative could very well be a metaphor for the madness of our time. The villagers live in isolation, afraid of what lies beyond the village's boundaries, ominously marked by posts whose eerie lanterns shine at night like motionless, gigantic fireflies to remind villagers where they must not trespass. The original settlers had hoped to escape the dangerous city and instead breed an artificial peace constantly shaken by the possibility of attack from the unknown. The creatures will not attack them as long as the villagers remain within the circle of torches lit on the outskirts of the village. The color red is forbidden, as it attracts the creatures: when a red wild flower blooms, one of the girls in the village quickly pulls it from the ground and buries it.
Had Mr. Shyamalan taken a stand or attempted to make a narrative point, "The Village" could have been more subtly and subvertly political than the overtly biased un-make of "The Manchurian Candidate." Alas, Mr. Shyamalan shuns the possibility of making a statement by hiding behind where the wild things are.
All of it prompts us to ask ourselves whether Mr. Shyamalan wants us to question the wisdom of creating superficial tranquility on the basis of a constant fear of what lurks on the other side. The answer is disappointing, as is the entire film. At the end, when villagers must decide whether to stay as they are or return to their origin, the answer is purportedly ambivalent, as if Mr. Shyalaman wanted an open ending. Not so, sadly. The decision had been taken already when the solution to the tragedy is to have one of the villagers cross the forest in search of assistance, instead of taking a dying man back to a hospital where his life-threatening infection could be treated.
Therefore, while Mr. Shyamalan poses the moral dilemma of the sad consequences of choosing an uneasy, false peace, he opts for the most contradictory solution: it is best to continue to live in inauthenticity instead of facing our own demons.
In this movie some will see subtlety, nuance, discretion; others, like me, will see boredom with a twisted New Age dose of Deepak Chopra masquerading as depth. Only a score jointly composed by John Tesh and Samfir would have made this movie worse.
Perhaps the most absurd character of all is Noah's, aptly and wastefully played by Adrian Brody. His mental insufficiency keeps him from performing as the rest of the sedate villagers, laughing at inappropriate moments and pursuing childish pranks, yet when he is locked up he ingeniously knows exactly what to do to free himself and even carry out a ruse that none of the presumably more intelligent villagers could have even considered.
The rest of the characters are brooding, dull entities that crawl across the screen and deliver lines with the celerity and vibrancy of frozen tar. Sigourney Weaver was never less convincing; Brendan Gleeson, who oozed poisoned energy as Menelaus in "Troy," is the embodiment of diffidence.
A most distressing aspect of this atrocity is the paucity of viable patches to cover the plot's gaping holes. If the forest surrounding the village is inhabited by vile creatures who can only be placated by an offering of skinned animals, how did the settlers initially reach the spot where they established the village? Did they drop in with parachutes? While the blind girl is used as the metaphor for the village elder's intellectual blindness, representing the true seer among them, why must she be chosen to cross the forest instead of used to "open the eyes" of the rest of the community? When she finds out the truth about the creatures, why does she not suggest that the village elders drop all pretense and go get help to save a dying young man?
Can the other side be so bad when the emissary is able to return unharmed to the village from a foray into "the towns"? Where are all the evil people of "the towns" when the solution to the pressing problem is provided by a kind-hearted person who steals so that the villager can have what the dying man needs back home?
Perhaps you will see this movie and not see discrepancies, distractions, contradictions, bad acting and worse dialogue; you may even think it the most enlightening film of the year, if not the decade. If you do, I suggest you see more than one film a year.