Shyamalan's Signs

M. Night Shyamalan has not yet found himself as an artist, but the media, dutifully promoting his new movie Signs, has resoundingly found him to be The Great Dumb Hope. Ever since 1999's The Sixth Sense supplied the craft and spooks that that summer's moviegoers felt cheated of by The Blair Witch Project, Shyamalan has been overrated as a great filmmaker ("storyteller" is the current misnomer). But box-office receipts prove nothing. (Does anyone really think Austin Powers in Goldmember grossed over $70 million its first weekend because it told a great story?) Shyamalan's praise comes from being a commercial simplifier. While the astonishing Minority Report slips down the charts because it confounds audiences unused to following a detailed story or comprehending dense, dazzling imagery, a director who boils everything down-who colors within the lines-basks in excessive appreciation. Shyamalan is hailed as Hollywood's savior because he reduces the art form to manipulation.

It's hard to separate Shyamalan's media coronation from the utter conventionality of Signs. Casting Mel Gibson as ex-Rev. Graham Hess, a Pennsylvania widower-skeptic who witnesses the visitation of extraterrestrials, is what an 80s studio exec would call "high concept." There's no woman to delay the action-plot with romance; Joaquin Phoenix (with that sexy frisson he brings to all his costarring roles) plays Gibson's brother with dynamic-duo efficiency; Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin play Gibson's two cutesied-up children; and all otherworldly UFO speculation comes down to suspense and violent retribution. Shyamalan deals in crude basics. Signs' spare, calculated elements are so relentlessly underscored (with James Newton Howard shamelessly imitating Bernard Herrmann) that most viewers will assume something's happening! (an 80s b-movie mantra). The cornfields of Hess' farm where crop circles appear-explained as the extraterrestrials' maps-suggest something ineffable. But the ineffable doesn't play in today's film culture unless, as here, audiences are told to take it lightly-and that's how Shyamalan shows he has nothing artistic in mind.

No Hollywood movie about a disillusioned minister is fresh, original or personal, cuz you know he's gonna put on his collar by fade-out. That's the gimmick of a Hollywood hustler, not a pop devout. Soft-selling Gibson's spirituality is a form of commercially minded spiritual denial. Shyamalan plays it so safe that the risk of spreading his own spiritual beliefs is covered by his eerie distractions, long scenes shot in the dark-audience manipulation that keeps Signs at the level of a potboiler. Shyamalan has achieved the trivial, which some people call "entertainment" because they don't want the profound.

Signs lacks the beauty of a work where each scene or line convinces one of the filmmaker's feelings. Even Roy Andersson's heart-crushed and brilliant Songs from the Second Floor offers better religious speculation than does Signs, because Andersson portrays how belief (or its absence) is evident in his characters' day-to-day world. Shyamalan uses crisis-of-faith cliches in a comic-book way-merely as premise-which makes Signs almost indistinguishable from movies like The Mothman Prophecies and Dragonfly. Shifty Shyamalan also cannily clones The Twilight Zone, but whereas Rod Serling, the doomy creator and hammy host of tv's Twilight Zone, proudly presented social and psychological parables, Shyamalan gets vague. He only copies Serling's portentousness, stretching his film to almost four times the length of a Zone episode, then offering coy platitudes. That's not progress. It's not even forthright.

Combining speculation about aliens with religion and myth is not so far from the apocalyptic manipulation of Independence Day. Shifty's more benign approach doesn't enlighten our thinking about the cosmos. In the recent Travis music video Side, directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris pay homage to Close Encounters to complete the song's extraterrestrial hypothesis. Dayton-Farris showed flying saucers and manmade crop circles, and used various media as means of witnessing, investigation and communication. Side is the advance (produced outside Hollywood) that Shyamalan doesn't dare. What the troubadours in Travis take to heart, Shyamalan takes from comic books. In a false religious analogy, Hess' son studies a book on UFOs ("Nerds analyze Greek mythology," he is told), but still Shyamalan avoids an exploration of the father's faith.

I dislike accusing a filmmaker of "manipulation," since that's the unjustified ploy critics use against the most accomplished and imaginative directors, but it's the only word that clarifies the Shyamalan hoax. Shifty traffics in themes and imagery associated with Steven Spielberg-though lacking the surprise or sincerity with which Spielberg enlightens pop audiences, taking them beyond comic book, adolescent fear. Signs' central scene imitates Hitchcock's bravura sequence of domestic terror in The Birds, but mainly Shyamalan rips off Close Encounters. Children's toys are fetishized, the protagonist is startled in a field, there's a mashed-potato dinner-table scene. But these aren't simply familiar pop codes; those motifs were part of Spielberg's blending the quotidian with the extraordinary. Shifty's slow metabolism caters to viewers who can't keep up with Spielberg's cinematic wit. It's not just Twilight Zone references that prove Shyamalan a student of tv. For his slow reveal of the first alien sighting, he turns a CNN broadcast into a Blair Witch fright scene (America's Kookiest Home Video. And the climactic battle is reflected in a tv monitor-signs that Shyamalan thinks in simplistic tv terms.

TV insipidness has ruined modern cinema, and it discourages personal expression. In Signs, Shyamalan rehomogenizes a genre that needs particularizing, theologies that need explaining. Ignoring actual crop-circle theories and credible religious doctrine, Shifty foists his belief in Hollywood's white-only, patriarchal agenda. Shyamalan himself plays a dark-skinned outsider who brings grief-and-hope to Gibson, but the relation between ethnic aliens and malevolent extraterrestrials remains worrisome and unspecified. Whatever Hindu background might inform Shyamalan's imagination, he submits to hegemony. (And instead of a great white hope performance from Gibson, he deservedly gets hangdog insincerity-dismaying after Gibson rousingly transcended even the trashy The Patriot and Conspiracy Theory.)

Is Shyamalan afraid to challenge Hollywood orthodoxy, or is he just another hack? Gibson's Reverend returns to his flock in a halfhearted way that seems designed to please the religious right and cautiously slip by anyone else. Signs is disappointing because its banality is a sign of creative cowardice. On Roxy Music's 1973 Stranded, Bryan Ferry challenged the pop audience by performing his own "Psalm." It was a great pop apostasy in that a rock star paused in his lechery long enough to look beyond his penis and wonder: "'Believe in Me' once seemed a good line/Now belief in Jesus is faith more sublime/Head in the clouds but I can't see the Lord/Short of perfection/I'll try to be good/I'll stand at His gate/I'll wait for His sign..."

Rock critics couldn't accept Ferry's seriousness, but an honest listener could hear it in his pensive longing for ecstasy. Ferry's conviction overwhelmed accusations of pop religiosity by etching a personal, genuine pop gospel. He sang "sublime" as a private yearning. There's little that's private, and nothing sublime in Signs. The best Shyamalan can do is make you remember there's lots of sublime stuff in Close Encounters: the ocean liner in the desert, the thousands of hands pointing up!-scenes that challenge skeptics to rethink their prejudices. By manipulating audiences but relieving them of big ideas, Shifty Shyamalan streamlines Hollywood product. Signs is Spielberg for Dummies.