Survivor gilt

OPPOSITES: Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah breaks like glass, while Bruce Willis’s David holds fast.

M. Night Shyamalan is a director who combines quiet moments with noisy ideas, a subtle style with crass high concept. Sometimes it works, as with his meal-ticket movie, The Sixth Sense. At other times, the film collapses under the stress, as with his first effort, Wide Awake, and his third and worst, Unbreakable. Like Sense, < I>Unbreakable reduces itself to a one-sentence pitch — here it’s a guy who’s the sole survivor of a train crash and wonders whether there mightn’t be a mysterious reason. Like Sense, Unbreakable stars Bruce Willis as its troubled hero and features a troubled wife and a troubled, endearing kid. And like Sense, Unbreakable promises a twist ending that will shatter your interpretation of everything you’ve seen. What’s different is that the gimmicks here break down, taking with them the fragile artifice of plausibility, authenticity, and emotional truth that Shyamalan has crafted.

In the opening sequence, for example, a pretty girl sits next to a brooding David Dunn (Bruce Willis, who’s one of the best at this kind of role and is in danger of becoming a self-parody) on a train to Philadelphia. There’s a shot of her shapely navel and tattoo, a pan to David’s face, another to his fingers as he clumsily removes his wedding ring. All this tells us a life story and its likely outcome, inept strivings to escape routine that meet with humiliation or worse. This time it’s much worse.

David’s son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark, even paler and more worried than Haley Joel Osment), learns of the wreck on the TV, the image appearing upside down as he’s hanging from the back of the couch. Those familiar with Shyamalan’s use of visual clues and insinuating motifs from The Sixth Sense might tune into this pattern of inversion, of things seen upside down or images shown in reflection. In Unbreakable, though, it’s all just red herrings, portents that are merely portentous.

Like the seemingly extraneous scene where Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson, in clothes that look borrowed from Star Wars and a weird James Brown coif) is born, a flashback to 1961 shot mostly in a mirror, in which an attending doctor discovers that the newborn’s limbs have broken from the stress of birth. Elijah, it turns out, suffers from a rare disorder that causes his bones to shatter — “Mr. Glass” was his nickname in school. He has occupied the years he’s spent in hospital beds reading comic books — which, like the rest of Hollywood, he has taken too seriously. As an adult he opens a comic-book gallery (in a unintentionally ludicrous speech in front of Egyptian hieroglyphs he proclaims the medium’s potential to transmit the secret history of the world), and he concocts a theory that since he is so eminently breakable, there must be, as in any good comic book, someone who is his opposite. When he hears about David’s survival, he thinks he has his man.

The magic and the guilt of survival have been explored before in movies, notably in Peter Weir’s brilliant, underrated Fearless. There the aura of invincibility is psychological and illusory and therefore tragic. Here it becomes painfully literal and, I suppose, comic — actually, Shyamalan’s inspiration seems to come more from comic strips than comic books, since it relies so heavily on the gag. Elijah’s suggestion to David that he might be a superhero shakes up his already shaky relationship with his son and his wife, Audrey (Robin Wright Penn — how did her character miss out on a Biblical name?), especially when Joseph decides to check out dad’s invulnerability with a .38.

Bizarre circumstances bring out the best and worst in people, and David and Audrey grow closer even as David develops new powers, such as the ability to read a stranger’s past through a mere touch, or bench-press 350 pounds, or take on the appearance of the Grim Reaper in the hood and poncho of his security-guard job. This clarifying power that extremity has may be why audiences seem to be craving tales of survival these days, such as the in:amous TV series, or the Ben Affleck/Gwyneth Paltrow movie Bounce, or Tom Hanks’s upcoming Cast Away, or the Florida-vote recount. As Elijah explains, “We live in a mediocre age. People no longer believe that there can be something extraordinary in themselves, or in other people.” The texture of a film like Unbreakable suggests that Shyamalan does believe in that element of the extraordinary in all of us. Which makes all the more heartbreaking the mediocrity of this movie’s resolution.

Like Al and Steve? NEW YORK — Writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan is a genius worthy of mention in the same breath as Hitchcock and Spielberg. Just ask him. The creator of The Sixth Sense is back with Unbreakable, another paranormal yarn starring Bruce Willis. Willis plays David Dunn, a security guard who is the unscathed sole survivor of a horrific train wreck. His polar opposite is Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), whose osteogenesis imperfecta (a real-life congenital disease that renders bones as brittle as glass) makes him as fragile as David is invulnerable. Elijah, who runs a gallery devoted to comic-book art, tries to convince David that he is a comic-worthy superhero; this leaves both David and his worshipful little boy (Spencer Treat Clark) in much existential angst over David’s place in the world. Such high-mindedness is typical for Shyamalan, whose Sixth Sense and little-seen Wide Awake also used Keane-eyed kids to explore metaphysical questions in a pop context. “What interests me in storytelling is the idea of believing, taking ordinary people like yourselves and making you believe in something, give it plausibility, and ride that line between fiction and fantasy,” he tells reporters. “If there’s someone with osteogenesis imperfecta in the world — and there are thousands and thousands of people like that — then it’s plausible that there are people in the world who are impervious to being hurt. There’s certainly a lot of examples of that. People fall out of planes, survive fires without a scratch. Those things intrigue me and make me start to believe, and I like to exercise that muscle, that believing muscle. That’s why children are in my movies a lot, because their muscles for believing are very strong. All of ours get pretty weak as we get older.” Shyamalan jokes that he reteamed with Willis because “everyone else was unavailable.” (Willis adds, “I was unemployed at the time.”) But the real reason was that he wanted to use the shorthand of a frequent director-actor pairing to make his name (pronounced “SHAM-a-lahn,” though even his own publicists can’t say it right) as familiar as those of other brand-name filmmakers. “I look back at other directors that I admire, and you see collaborations that establish a pattern of filmmaking — Hitchcock with some of the actors he kept repeating, or better yet, Spielberg with Richard Dreyfuss in the first two movies, Jaws and Close Encounters [actually, those were Spielberg’s second and third theatrical releases]. It’s to have a mass-audience relationship. I’m trying very hard to develop an understanding of what this name means when you see it on a movie. For me and Bruce to do two movies together, then they come to associate with that name and that style of filmmaking that feeling and experience.” To protect the integrity of that experience, Shyamalan cautions viewers not to spoil the ending, which is a Twilight Zone twist like the one in Sixth Sense. “It’s a very unsatisfying thing to do, I would think, and a very unkind thing. If you enjoyed the experience, why wouldn’t you want your sister or brother to have that same kind of fun?” Indeed, Shyamalan is so protective of his work that when I ask Jackson, a real-life comic-book geek, an arcane question to test the depth of his comics knowledge and determine whether certain comics characters had influenced his portrayal of the flamboyant, eccentric Elijah, Shyamalan cuts me off. “He can’t answer that question. That’s not a good question.” Jackson interjects, “The answer is no.” Says Shyamalan, “The answer and the question should not be printed.” Shyamalan wrote the role with Jackson in mind, and Jackson says it was an eerie fit. “I’ve had knee surgery, and I’ve been on crutches for 10 and a half weeks in New York City in the winter. So I understand that dynamic of walking around and not having access to things. I also understand his sense of ridicule as a child, being called ‘Mr. Glass,’ because I stuttered when I was a kid, and kids would call me things like ‘Duh-duh’ and ‘B-b-b’ and ‘Machine Gun.’ So I stayed in the house too. And I do read comic books, still. I have a healthy respect for comic art. So I relate to Elijah in a lot of ways that Night didn’t know. Karmically, maybe I was supposed to do this.” Shyamalan also created David specifically for Willis. But the action hero insists that though he’s “just a regular guy” like David, he’s not indestructible. “I’m vulnerable emotionally. I’m vulnerable as a human being. I’m not invincible. I’m just like you guys. If you cut me, do we not bleed?” — Gary Susman