Guys,
One last thing, if you can bear with me: I’ve been meaning all week to mount the case for The Sixth Sense, a film audiences loved and critics liked, sortakinda, but seemed to worry about liking too much. In my opinion, The Sixth Sense is every bit as ambitious and provocative, and in some ways more fully realized, than Three Kings. Let’s start with the small gifts of this movie, the little things it attempts that so few American movies ever bother with. The urban backdrop: Tak Fujimoto’s sublimely subtle, atmospheric cinematography made Philadelphia look ancient, decadent, well-worn; rarely does an American film setting feel so saturated with the past and teeming with the footprints left by earlier generations. Then there’s the low-key honesty about class–the contrast between Bruce Willis’s psychologist, a posterboy gentrifier in a townhouse stuffed with antiques, and the wonderful Toni Colette’s struggling mom. With just a few quick strokes, writer-director M. N. Shyamalan paints a totally authentic-feeling picture of yuppiedom–its decent intentions, complacency, and loneliness–and I didn’t see a less whitewashed or sensational portrait of working-class family life this year. (As opposed to the voyeuristic Rosetta, where the camera pants after the poor heroine, cornering her like a pig in a pen and treating her vulnerability as a turn-on–an occasion for a kind of art-house porn.) As for the famous trick ending, it is not a trick so much as the solution to a problem the film has been posing all along. The film has such a fragmented point of view, it’s like a rigorously worked-out cubist canvas, except that unlike a cubist, Shyamalan moves through the fragments to a new level of clarity. I may be jumping to conclusions based on the fact that Shayamalan is Indian-American, but The Sixth Sense strikes me as philosophically rather complicated, and possibly in dialogue with some non-Western ideas you don’t get to see too often in films, unless they’re uttered in egregiously bad faith by a wisecracking, turban-wearing showboat like Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams. Many critics felt that toward the end, the ghosts became too unthreatening, too adorable–and here I admit they had a point. On the other hand, I don’t think this was just pandering. Death is everywhere in The Sixth Sense; the point of the film, unusually wise for a blockbuster, is that death is inevitable, and not an enemy.
I wanted to thank you, David, for passing the piece by Daniel Menaker. It was as excellent as promised–and yet the pace of change these days is quick. Even since he wrote that piece a few months ago, Being John Malkovich has come out, and Boys Don’t Cry, and a few other movies which taken together suggest that breaking through to the real is no longer such a priority. Compared with these films, The Truman Show, with its paranoid and simplistic pursuit of innocence, already feels 15 years old. In fact, the best films this year no longer placed much stock in reality at all. They leapt into gray areas, where human beings behaved like machines (The Matrix) and machines demonstrated human potential (I’m thinking of The Iron Giant, and his talent for sculpture.) They leapt, suddenly, from one plane of reality to another (the freeze frames on Tracy Flick’s deformed, mid-motion face in Election, the sudden abstracted shots in Three Kings where a body ceased to be a person and became the pathway for a bullet and a haven for microbes and disease.) They explored the problem of two souls, same model body (the duplicate Buzz Lightyear’s in Toy Story 2) and one soul, too many bodies (Being John Malkovich). They explored the problem of a soul attempting to will its wishes into being, even when the body can’t easily accommodate them (Boys Don’t Cry, The Sixth Sense.) Body and soul: This, it seems to me, is the problem that inspired the best moments in the best films of 1999. This was fun. I’d especially like to thank you, David–the most generous and stimulating of hosts.
