 "Manoj Night Shyamalan")
More than ten years ago, in 2002, Manoj Night Shyamalan appeared on the cover of Newsweek, his hands placed assertively on his hips, confidently staring into the distance, looking like more of a movie star than a director. ‘The Next Spielberg,’ proclaimed the cover (in large sized-text) along with ‘Hollywood’s Hottest New Story Teller.’
Today, those words come seem cruelly ironic. In a phantom twist, Newsweek doesn’t exist as a print magazine and neither does Shyamalan’s career, (at least according to Hollywood observers.) If it were at all possible that ex-wunderkind Shyamalan couldn’t hit a new low, he has somehow managed to helm, After Earth, which has been roundly panned.
The real ignominy for Shyamalan is that Columbia, the studio that produced the movie, was so petrified that moviegoers would be put off by Shyamalan’s association with the film that they tried to bury his name from any of the marketing and publicity paraphernalia. This was a director whose movies had famously announced themselves with "A film by M Night Shyamalan". Evidently, a brand had become a liability.
It is unclear as to whether the awfulness of After Earth was Hollywood superstar Will Smith’s doing — after all, the story idea was his and Smith also produced the film with the idea that it could act as a perfect father-son vehicle that his son Jaden could capitalise on.
But in this clunker, Shyamalan is unable to extract even a modicum of range from his one-note actors. Smith senior, normally a charismatic screen presence, is more wooden than a door-post and his hapless son seems to be trying to emulate him.
Auteur Rising
To be the successor to arguably the most financially successful and consistently entertaining movie director in history is no mean feat, but Shymalan showed himself to be not just a technical showman but a box office shaman as well. He blazed out of nowhere with The Sixth Sense, his first big movie that clocked $687 million worldwide, but was made for just $40 million.
It also heralded his signature style — a fetish for the supernatural thriller or parable, ominous framing, dollops of mysticism and characters who battled some kind of spiritual or existential crisis. His ultimate stamp was a twist in the end that hoped to leave audiences dazzled.
At the time, Sense, however flawed, came off as confident and original and in an industry that revered auteurs — directors with strong personal styles who have ultimate creative control over their movies — Shyamalan seemed like a potential addition to those who established themselves in the 1990s such as Quentin Tarantino and Lars Von Trier.
Then came Unbreakable starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson, a stylish, contemporary take on good versus evil superheroes battling it out amidst a middle class urban landscape.
So far so good. His next one, Signs dealt with a family dealing with mysterious geometric crop patterns that regularly appear in the American midwest —not a great movie but good enough to evoke this response from film critic, Roger Ebert: “M Night Shyamalan's Signs is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air."
At this time, people started to wonder if Shyamalan could perhaps be a legitimate heir to Alfred Hitchcock. After all, he had showed promising signs of being a master craftsman of the art of suspense much like the great man.
Yet AO Scott, film critic for the New York Times was less impressed with Signs. "Mr Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular — and as empty — as those bare patches out in the cornfield” he wrote, alluding to a question that began making the rounds at about the same time – Was Shyamalan simply a one- trick-pony rather than the auteur he was made out to be?
The Fall
Many felt that this question was unequivocally answered when he released his next film, The Village, set in the 18th or 19th century, about people from a small rural community who are terrorised by creatures living in the woods. It was an unmitigated critical disaster with the obligatory Shyamalan ‘twist-ending’ so ludicrous that it engendered either unbridled laughter or anger (or, in some cases, the former followed by the latter).
Things appeared to go rapidly downhill from there. Along came a pet project, Lady in the Water, a bedtime story that "he made for his children" that prodded Trevor Johnston of Time Out to say the following: “What was [Shyamalan] thinking? This isn't just duff, it's career-threatening catastrophic.”
This wasn’t enough to prevent Shyamalan from releasing The Happening, a tale of a family fleeing a potential apocalypse, thanks to vegetation that has begun attacking humans. Soylent Green it was not.
Christopher Orr of the New Republic described it as “so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined.” Shyamalan’s name on trailers now began to attract chuckles and the occasional guffaw.
Despite the near-universal opprobrium being showered on him, Shyamalan still had enough cache in Hollywood to be able to make The Last Airbender, based on a popular children’s animated series and it seemed like a sensible choice to try and salvage one’s career.
But once again, critics loathed it. Ebert, once appreciative of Shyamalan’s gifts for creating a sense of anxiety, said this: "The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.” And then there was After Earth.
How could someone who was such a prodigious talent — like Scorcese and Hitchcock, Shyamalan storyboards every shot — and who was able to attract top-drawer talent in every one of his movies, plummet to such depths? Was there an inability to self-evaluate and establish checks and balances to avoid a descent into self-deluded madness?
Money, it’s a gas
Money can do strange things to your brain. Before the release of Lady in the Water, he told Time magazine, "If you're not betting on me, then nobody should get money. I've made profit a mathematical certainty. I'm the safest bet you got."
Ironically, that movie was the only Shyamalan movie that didn’t make a profit, but the rest were real money-spinners. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs alone garnered over $1.5 billion.
Shyamalan’s hubris, or arrogance or self-belief — call it what you will — stems from the fact that he always thought he was special. Born in Puducherry, India, Shyamalan’s parents moved to the US when he was a child and he grew up in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb and attended the private Episcopal Academy before joining Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
“I was an Indian kid who grew up in a white suburb, and who loved Spielberg, and who went to Catholic school but is really Hindu. Maybe that's a pretty interesting point of view. Not many people have that,” he said in an earlier interview.
Unfortunately, self-exoticism can only go that far. Hitchcock was serially fascinating because whether it was Vertigo, The 39 Steps or Notorious, for instance, it wasn’t the twists in the movie that were as memorable as the characters in them. Seemingly mundane dialogue dripped with tension simply because they were taking place at a subtextual level and characters would lie constantly.
Night’s movies instead largely hinged on ‘big,’ increasingly hokey ideas, loose plots and pseudo-philosophical conversational gems such as "water teaches us acceptance," "you must let anger go," and "there is no love without sacrifice" (all from The Last Airbender). Manohla Dargis, critic for the New York Times put it best in her review of After Earth that “Mr Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.”
Today, Shyamalan should have been a part of his generations of great auteurs — Paul Thomas Anderson, Lynne Ramsey, Steve McQueen and Jhi Zangke — amongst others. Instead, he is apparently absorbed in writing a book on education reform which, some say, is a metaphor for his career’s tragic trajectory.
Yet, there’s still time. All he has to do is revisit a brilliant movie that he wrote many years ago that had no twists or ghosts but instead charted the travails of a mouse called Stuart Little. Maybe you need to revisit the charm of a talking rodent in order to re-discover yourself.
