My wife Katherine and I were eating breakfast this morning and just kind of cruising through the TV stations. One of the cable stations was replaying M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, so we watched the last half hour or so. Watching this movie again, I was struck by how well it was filmed and the layers of storyline involved. Seeing it again (disclaimer: I've seen all or parts of it about 6 to 8 times), I realized that Shyamalan is probably never going to be fully recognized for his brilliance by today's shoot-um-up, blow-um-up audience.
On the cinematic side, the things Shyamalan did with the camera were amazing. For example, when David is choking out the home invader/murderer, he actually looks like he is flying around the room. Earlier in that scene, when David enters the room where the mother is dead, the director shoots the frame from outside the house, looking through the blowing curtains. It seems as if David appears out of thin air, like one would expect from a superhero. The camera work in the movie is superb. One look at the coloring, the angles, and the lighting reveals that Shyamalan is going places that most of his contemporaries can't touch.
There are so many great scenes of raw emotion in Unbreakable. Bruce Willis' David carries his angst on his sleeve and the emotion is palpable. Robin Wright Penn is so good as Audrey, the wife who is trying to understand why her family is disintegrating around her. She plays a physical therapist who spends her days piecing people back together, but her own family is broken -- seemingly beyond repair.
Take a look at the scene where Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) loads the gun and threatens to shoot his father. David tries several psychological tricks on the boy before finding the one that works...the threat of permantly destroying the family unit, despite the fact that it is already crumbling around them.
It is inconceivable that the Academy Award voters could pass on the roles played by any of the main characters in this film. Willis, in particular, shows his skills as a dramatic actor. Notice the look of fear on his face when he realizes he must act when his superhero instincts kick in at the train station. Whenever he is untying the children from the radiator, his hands are shaking more than the victims. Like Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump character, I can't imagine another Hollywood star filling David's shoes in Unbreakable. It is a career-defining role for Bruce Willis.
Quite frankly, Shyamalan may simply be too intelligent a filmmaker to be fully recognized by the general public. There is an inherent war between philosophers and kings in American society. Philosophers are people, generally, who ponder emotions and the implications of events by placing them within some version of a worldview. These people are the creative types in society. On the other hand, kings are the people who make snap decisions, often based on gut feelings or instincts and see events as processes. The kings are CEOs, managers, and administrators. Kings are rewarded for making decisions.
In our society, the battle for control between the philosophers and the kings boils down to a fight over vastly different views of what it means to live justly and correctly. Not only do the two sides not understand each other, they can't even visualize how the other side lives.
I would hazard that most people who don't see the beauty of Unbreakable are in the King camp. The make a snap decision about whether or not they like the movie based solely on what they perceived they saw on the screen. Trained to conclude, then stick to it, they write off a multi-layered film like this one. Philosophers, however, sensing the nuances of the characters, the skill of the actors, and the stunning originality of Shyamalan's take on the superhero genre, revel in a move like Unbreakable.
Here's a Web site that has a lot of great Shyamalan info: http://www.shyamalan.cjb.net/
