'Village' of Idiots

Here's all you need to know about M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. Porky Pig. Gated community. Trick ending. And something about red.

I kid. There's a little more to it, but not much really.

The Village reminded me not so much of Hitchock but Scooby Doo. When at the end of that cartoon it was revealed that glowing skull creature was actually Old Mr. Higgins the caretaker, it pissed me off even as a little kid. Just let the monsters be real, just once, okay? Of course it never happened and it left a simmering sense of disappointment and bitterness which all came back during The Village.

Since Mr. Shyamalan's one trick pony is the twist ending, it makes it hard to talk about without revealing the surprise but since the film has been out for a few weeks maybe you've gleaned what it is. If not, I'm going to tell you. Look away those with a taste for unspoiled endings.

The Village is never given a name. It's just a little place in which people dwell in isolated rural bliss, except for the fact that they're surrounded by the dark and frightening forests in which fearsome creatures dwell. If the Blair Witch Project taught us anything it's that woods are scary and that film students are largely jerks who deserve to be spirited off by evil entities. Unlike the grainy video footage of the Blair Witch, The Village is a beautifully shot film and Mr. M. Night deserves credit for creating a compelling love story between blind Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) and the luscious Lucius Hunt played by Joaquin Phoenix, whose vexatious lip divot gets more and more distracting every time I see it. I want to lay my little finger in there to see if it fits.

Hurt can be painful

Anyway, that's another story. The first half of the film recounts the slow rhythms of village life: both its joys and sorrows, deaths and births, weddings and funerals. The Elders, of which William Hurt (Edward Walker) and Sigourney Weaver (Alice Hunt) are the two central figures, have lots of meetings in which they gravely intone portentous things in some strange stilted form of 19th century English. Or as William Hurt would say in agonizingly slow cadence "We've always HAD a gentle... UNDERSTANDING with the CREATURES who dwell beyond our borders..."

In lovely montages of colour that imply the passage of time and the seasons, the people of the village get married, have feasts and barn dances and all is gay. Not in modern sexy sense but in a more innocent way. Innocence is a word that is plied heavily here but for all their piety and purity, there's isn't a whole lot of God talk. In fact I don't think the big dude is mentioned hardly at all.

There is a snake in this garden however, and when Ivy and Lucius decide to get hitched all hell breaks loose. Ivy's idiot friend (played by Adrien Brody) stabs Lucius in a fit of jealousy and Ivy must venture into the woods to fetch medicine to help save her beloved. In no time, her scaredy cat companions run off and leave her to stumble through the woods, falling in holes and getting her nice yellow blanket all dirty. Now why they send a blind girl is a good question, but like all M. Night stuff there is a reason. A goofy reason, but a reason nonetheless.

Control freak creator?

Mr. M. is a triple barreled threat -- writer, producer and director -- and really this is like inseminating yourself and then giving birth to your own baby. If he considered sharing the credits things might work better. Obviously he has the eye of a director, his films are lovely, colour coded as they are, but as a writer he falls down hard.

In the woods Ivy is attacked by the one of the fearsome beasts and we get a good long look at it. It's a combination porcupine and wild boar, a porky pig if you will, in little Red Riding Hood drag. Mr. M. Night has a thing about the colour red. It is the bad colour people keep saying over and over. Yes, it's bad alright, especially when it comes leaking out of people. So does Ivy make it back alive with the precious 'medicines' or does she get eaten by the monster?

Are you ready for the BIG TWIST!? Here it is. It's all fake.

This quaint 19th century village was apparently started by a bunch of renegade social workers from the 1970's who all worked at the same counseling center and all had apparently had it with the savageries of modern existence; its murder, mayhem and greed. So in essence they go back to create another Eden. A perfect little bubble world in which women are women, men are men and no one apparently owns a comb. I've never seen such messy hair in my life. Everyone looks like they've been run through a hedge backwards. They also concoct an elaborate method of keeping their flock scared out if its collective wits by dressing up in big monsters costumes and running around skinning bunnies and snaking their big claws along the window sills. Terrifying if you're under age six, but for adults a little less plausible.

The fear factor

The Village is the ultimate gated community. In fact it's entirely surrounded by a big gate: not to keep everybody else out but to keep the people of the Village in. M. Night's films have the unfortunate quality of making you reassess what you've just watched in light of the ending which is interesting for a moment but then just makes you feel you've been had like an $8.95 sucker. Like the infamous Dallas episode where Pam wakes up and find Bobby in the shower, it's a cheap trick and can leave audiences feeling disgruntled and oddly used.

The Village has this unfortunate aftertaste. And, if The Village is a meant to frighten, it doesn't do much more than offer a mild boo or two. Scooby Doo where are you?

The echoes of the real politics of fear are obvious but not well thought out. If the film is truly an allegory or a fable as it presents itself what is it trying to say exactly? That the colour coded system of fear mongering in the U.S. is all part of a grand conspiracy? Or that the notion that you can escape the complexities of human life by returning to earlier, purer age is a fairytale?

If the entire premise of The Village is that the only escape from the horrors of the modern world is to tune in, turn on and drop out, the first two didn't work all that well, and the last has its own drawbacks. As a child who grew up with 'back to the landers' let me tell you this way of life isn't all that idyllic and it won't be long before all the sweet innocent village girls just want to hang at the mall. If only they knew what one was.

'Forting up'

Gated communities, far from representing an alternative to social disorder, purportedly do just the opposite. A variety of books and articles have examined the growth of gated communities in the U.S. and Canada and many social critics believe they pose a threat to democracy at its most basic.

In Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States, authors Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder call gated communities a type of "forting up" and ask: "What is the measure of nationhood when the divisions between neighborhoods require guards and fences to keep out other citizens? When public services and even local government are privatized, when the community of responsibility stops at the subdivision gates, what happens to the function and the very idea of a social and political democracy? Can the nation fulfill its social contract in the absence of social contact?"

The people in The Village can play at their fairytales because their enclave is a billionaire funded social experiment with enough money to bribe airlines and the government from letting planes fly over. What it's really saying is that if you have sufficient money you CAN escape, make your own time machine and go back to a place where everyone is white, gender roles are well defined and children listen to their parents, all for the price of freedom and truth.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee.