Body and Soul
Guys,
One last thing, if you can bear with me: I've been meaning all week to mount
the case for The Sixth Sense , a film audiences loved and critics liked,
sortakinda, but seemed to worry about liking too much. In my opinion, The
Sixth Sense is every bit as ambitious and provocative, and in some ways
more fully realized, than Three Kings . Let's start with the small gifts
of this movie, the little things it attempts that so few American movies ever
bother with. The urban backdrop: Tak Fujimoto's sublimely subtle, atmospheric
cinematography made Philadelphia look ancient, decadent, well-worn; rarely does
an American film setting feel so saturated with the past and teeming with the
footprints left by earlier generations. Then there's the low-key honesty about
class--the contrast between Bruce Willis's psychologist, a posterboy gentrifier
in a townhouse stuffed with antiques, and the wonderful Toni Colette's
struggling mom. With just a few quick strokes, writer-director M. N. Shyamalan
paints a totally authentic-feeling picture of yuppiedom--its decent intentions,
complacency, and loneliness--and I didn't see a less whitewashed or sensational
portrait of working-class family life this year. (As opposed to the voyeuristic
Rosetta , where the camera pants after the poor heroine, cornering her
like a pig in a pen and treating her vulnerability as a turn-on--an occasion
for a kind of art-house porn.) As for the famous trick ending, it is not a
trick so much as the solution to a problem the film has been posing all along.
The film has such a fragmented point of view, it's like a rigorously worked-out
cubist canvas, except that unlike a cubist, Shyamalan moves through the
fragments to a new level of clarity. I may be jumping to conclusions based on
the fact that Shayamalan is Indian-American, but The Sixth Sense strikes
me as philosophically rather complicated, and possibly in dialogue with some
non-Western ideas you don't get to see too often in films, unless they're
uttered in egregiously bad faith by a wisecracking, turban-wearing showboat
like Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams. Many critics felt that toward the end,
the ghosts became too unthreatening, too adorable--and here I admit they had a
point. On the other hand, I don't think this was just pandering. Death is
everywhere in The Sixth Sense ; the point of the film, unusually wise for
a blockbuster, is that death is inevitable, and not an enemy.
I wanted to thank you, David, for passing the piece by
Daniel Menaker. It was as excellent as promised--and yet the pace of change
these days is quick. Even since he wrote that piece a few months ago, Being
John Malkovich has come out, and Boys Don't Cry , and a few other
movies which taken together suggest that breaking through to the real is
no longer such a priority. Compared with these films, The Truman Show ,
with its paranoid and simplistic pursuit of innocence, already feels 15 years
old. In fact, the best films this year no longer placed much stock in reality
at all. They leapt into gray areas, where human beings behaved like machines
( The Matrix ) and machines demonstrated human potential (I'm thinking of
The Iron Giant , and his talent for sculpture.) They leapt, suddenly,
from one plane of reality to another (the freeze frames on Tracy Flick's
deformed, mid-motion face in Election , the sudden abstracted shots in
Three Kings where a body ceased to be a person and became the pathway
for a bullet and a haven for microbes and disease.) They explored the problem
of two souls, same model body (the duplicate Buzz Lightyear's in Toy Story
2 ) and one soul, too many bodies ( Being John Malkovich ). They
explored the problem of a soul attempting to will its wishes into being, even
when the body can't easily accommodate them ( Boys Don't Cry , The
Sixth Sense .) Body and soul: This, it seems to me, is the problem that
inspired the best moments in the best films of 1999. This was fun. I'd
especially like to thank you, David--the most generous and stimulating of
hosts.
