Molly Grattan Presents: Bring Me the Head of Scott Baio!

08.01.04
Movie Review: The Village

But first, a few words on movie theater etiquette:

1. I don’t care if you’re speaking Italian, I can still hear you. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
2. You had to call your friend in the middle of the movie to tell her how boring it is? Take it in the lobby or SHUT THE FUCK UP. I won't hesitate to rip that phone out of your hand and beat you to death with it.
3. Don’t even ask. You and I both know that I’m kicking the back of your seat on purpose. Now SHUT THE FUCK UP before I start kicking the back of your head, also on purpose.

My dream is to have my own screening room someday. In this screening room, I will have one seat. My friends think that it’s some kind of elaborate metaphor for my life, but I think really, I just want some peace and quiet.

They don’t stand for this sort of thing in New York, by the way. I saw fist fights break out between little old ladies and gay men during William Haines retrospective week at Film Forum after somebody crinkled their candy wrappers too loudly during the opening credits.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village stars Joaquin Phoenix (less callow with each new feature), Adrien Brody (never callow to begin with) and Bryce Dallas Howard (in the Haley Joel Osment role). It’s the story of a group of people who have left the city behind to live an Amish-ish existence in an isolated village, which is surrounded by a forest full of monsters. They stay out of the forest, and the monsters let them going on living their lives, singing, dancing, intermarrying and speaking some dialect that sounds like Pennsylvania Dutch translated into Yiddish. Then, of course, the monsters renege on the deal, and there’s your movie. It goes a little something like this:

Agggh! Monsters! Real monsters!

No, wait. Not real monsters.

Aggh! Yes, real monsters!

No wait… come on, make up your mind…

Phoenix, as the brooding village hunk, and Howard, as the spunky village blind girl are very good and have a lot of chemistry together. The monsters are pretty scary for awhile. M. gives himself a nifty Hitchcockian cameo. The supporting cast of village elders (including Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, and Cherry Jones) all look like John Tenniel illustrations from Alice in Wonderland.

Some reviewers have pointed out that the entire exercise resembles an overstuffed Twilight Zone episode, but without Rod Serling to add exposition and ironic comment at the end. (One plot point in particular seems to be cribbed straight from the 1961 episode “A Hundred Years Over the Rim”, about a 1860’s wagon trainer traveling into the future to fetch some penicillin.) So what is The Big Message, the What Does It All Mean? Something about the power of faith and justifying lies in the name of religion. Whatever.

The message might be more effective if M. would learn that out-of-focus-in-the-distance is always scarier than close up and clear; that a leg is always scarier than a whole monster and that sometimes mysterious and unexplained would be better than denouement. Then maybe he’d stop ruining his own movies at the 90-minute mark.