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All the right 'Signs'
[Photo: Touchstone Pictures]
Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) tries to calm his children Morgan, left, (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin), who think that tin foil helmets will stop the aliens from reading their minds. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 1, 2002
M. Night Shyamalan practices good storytelling, where part of the fright is not seeing what you think is there.
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The last thing moviegoers expect -- and the first thing we need these days -- from an alien invasion movie is subtlety. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's Signs proves that spaceships needn't dwarf Manhattan and space creatures are scarier when we don't get a good look at them.
Signs owes more to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead than Independence Day, with its main characters trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, figuring out a worldwide catastrophe that other filmmakers would delight in showing us. Shyamalan is a teaser, deftly balancing shock and comic relief with patience that must spring from his Hindu background. Certainly that spirituality emerges in his underlying theme of faith vs. luck, coincidence vs. karma.
Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) used to be a believer in higher guidance, a reverend who left the pulpit after his wife's death. Details of her demise, like the juiciest parts of Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, are things you shouldn't discuss with friends until after they see Signs. Graham raises his two children, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin), with help from his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), whose background is another hush-hush matter. Shyamalan will let you know, at times clumsily, when the time is right.
Suffice to say that those crop circles figuring so prominently in the preview trailers for Signs are just the beginning of the summer's scariest movie. Shyamalan has more tricks up his sleeve, perhaps a few too many in his exuberance, but his method of revealing them is a fine example of storytelling.
Halfway through a first screening of Signs, I found myself marveling at Shyamalan's willingness to paint his movie into a corner, at a particular point of no return when what's happening becomes clear. There seems to be no easy way out except for the deluge of special effects and gung-ho heroics used too many times before.
[Photo: Touchstone Pictures]
Morgan Hess (Rory Culkin) shows his father Graham (Mel Gibson) something strange in Signs by M. Night Shyamalan.
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Shyamalan takes the higher road less traveled, focusing on the psychological tension and not its cathartic, visceral release. That might explain why the cerebral finale feels a little flat compared with the rest of the movie. Some of the mind games are elementary, others too abrupt, but they are always presented with an ambitious filmmaker's intention of climbing into our heads before creeping under our skin.
Much of the credit goes to cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (The Silence of the Lambs), who knows what to display, but more important, what to hold back, and composer James Newton Howard, whose string-heavy score sets a relentlessly tense pace. Signs has its share of cheap shocks -- sudden noises and grasping claws -- but its thoroughly conceived dread makes those short cuts tolerable.
Signs also works as a post-9/11 allegory, with the huddled Hess family grasping for information through repetitive television reports, and the horror concocted in our minds when the information doesn't come fast enough. It's an invasion out of nowhere by an enemy we don't understand; a feeling only too familiar today.
Gibson is our foremost father figure in the movies these days and the concern Graham shows for his family is affecting, if ordinary. He strains a bit to make us believe Graham is too pious to curse, or can snap at his adorable children after doting so heavily. That's part of Shyamalan's lone (and minor) writing weakness, a propensity to shift character tones or ladle exposition with the brusqueness of a comic book.
Shyamalan does know how to write for and direct child actors, as we see with Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and the two children here. Culkin is the latest, most promising member of that acting brood, and Breslin is an unpolished scene-stealer. Phoenix makes Merrill an affable, overgrown kid until the chips are down and the role grows up.
A second viewing of Signs, after all its secrets are known, was nearly as satisfying as the first. Part of the fun came from knowing when to watch everyone else jump. That's a good sign (pardon the pun) for any movie dependent upon the element of surprise. The best surprise about Shyamalan's movie is its awareness that all the flashy special effects in the world can't scare us as much as 10 seconds of total darkness.
Signs
- Grade: B+
- Director: M. Night Shyamalan
- Cast: Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, Cherry Jones, M. Night Shyamalan, Patricia Kalember
- Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan
- Rating: PG-13; brief violence and profanity, scary images
- Running time: 106 min.
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