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Also this issue: The Punk Moms' Club Behind the Screens |
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August 1- 7, 2002
movies
 They're Heeeere: Joaquin Phoenix (left) and Mel Gibson cast light on a tiny intruder. |
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SignsWritten and directed by M. Night Shyamalan A Touchstone release Opens Friday at area theaters
Signs doesn’t look much like an alien invasion movie. Rather than presenting climactic battles or fearsome big-eyed creatures, it focuses instead on establishing moods. These include familiar responses within the genre (wonder, dread, anticipation), but they are also remarkable in that, at least initially, they are predicated on not knowing and not seeing exactly what’s going on. Indeed, for about 90 minutes, M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie resists showing much of anything, relying instead on not-so-informative TV news reports and reaction shots to convey the scary business.
The movie's initial image lays out what's at stake. The camera looks out over a yard -- swing set, picnic bench, cornfield in the background -- then pulls back slightly, its focus turning wavy to indicate that it's shooting through a bedroom windowpane. Here distortion provides clarification, exposes a frame and a context for what had seemed an unobstructed view. The idea is abstract but also directly affects your understanding of all that follows, not inviting you inside a particular character's perspective as much as it underlines that seeing in itself is limited, uncertain and subjective.
Thus disoriented, you meet the bedroom's occupant, Graham Hess (Mel Gibson). As the movie begins, he's waking with a start. And you soon learn, in deft little flicks of characterization, that he has good reason to be sleeping badly; the death of his beloved wife in a terrible car accident six months ago led this former Episcopalian minister to leave the church. In something of a rescue effort, Graham's brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) has moved in over the garage, and together they are raising corn and Graham's two young children, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin).
As if that weren't enough trauma, within minutes of waking, Graham hears his kids calling him. He and Merrill run from the house, following the sound out to the middle of the cornfield, where Morgan and Bo stand stunned. "I think God did it," says Morgan, turning his dad's head with his hand, so he sees this stunning sight, the crop sign that you've likely seen in the film's trailers. The camera pulls far out and up, to show the vast and awesome truth that Graham and his kids can't possibly see, that there are multiple signs, all enormous, all precise.
The Hess family only glimpse the scope of the phenomenon after they get inside and turn on the television, which is broadcasting hovering helicopter shots of similar signs that have appeared overnight in fields all over the world, accompanied by commentary suggesting that either the hoax is very elaborate, or everyone's in a lot of trouble. Graham, a disillusioned believer in forces greater than himself, initially opts for the hoax; the others adopt a less skeptical, more easily terrorized attitude. Still, even Graham's skepticism gets a run for its money when the practical-minded Officer Paski (Cherry Jones), drops by to check out the crop signs. She advises Graham to take his kids into town for pizza: "Get their minds, and your mind, on everyday things."
While the film piles up spooky details -- shadowy figures, anxious dogs, tippy-tappy footsteps on the roof at night, faint screeches on a baby monitor (Morgan wisely describes these as "code") -- it doesn't quite take one "side" or the other. This despite the fact that there's never much doubt that aliens are coming. What remains unknown, and compels attention, is how anyone might deal with such a drastic occurrence. The film's interest is not in what aliens will do, but in how Graham and his family interpret experience and manage responsibilities to one another, when all ostensible knowledge is uncertain.
The fact that the movie began production (in Bucks County) two days after 9/11 makes this uncertainty especially resonant, essentially represented as television (one home video of an alien resembles the famously scritchy "Bigfoot" tape, as if they're watching some When Aliens Attack reality show). At the same time, Signs includes other familiar images, from movies, particularly those in which characters are trapped and isolated -- The Birds, Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even Panic Room.
So much of Signs seems like intelligent commentary on contemporary existence, the mundane processing of extraordinary events and desires. During one late-night conversation on the sofa, Graham and Merrill start taking measure: who has faith and who believes in luck; which might be more comforting; how their belief structures have been tested, undone or confirmed. It's a moving moment, with the light of the TV playing on their faces and the children slumbering up against them. Sadly, the movie eventually abandons its delicate ambiguity, its attention to such everyday things, to deliver a resolution which can only look contrived and reductive.
