Signs

Signs

I see Gold people.

Signs is the best big film of the year and a sure sign that writer/director M. Night Shyamalan is firmly entrenched in Hollywood's top echelon. Signs will be Oscar® nominated for Best Picture and and Best Director.

Signs is a dramatic story about a family facing normal issues in the most remarkable of times. It's about faith and carries through Shyamalan's earlier fascination with the boundaries between life and death from The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.

Everything clicks in this understated Sci-fi film about an alien visitation. The script is tightly woven so that no word is wasted in the development of characters, execution of the plot or delivering of laughs. Shyamalan uses a flashback technique to drive home the intertwined plot and confirm the overall movie message about faith in signs.

The set helps tell the story from the corn field location to the opening scene showing a family picture with Gibson in a reverend's collar. By using that picture as a background filling device, the audience is told that Gibson is probably a widower and has probably left the church. Having conveyed this family situation up-front Shyamalan doesn't have to set it up with dialogue or an opening burial scene. The corn field, while serving as an alien map, also provides a sense of isolation that helps the story be about the family exclusive of the world around them.

Even great lines and plot can be fouled up by an overly complicated production and lousy acting. No problem here. Mel Gibson (as Father Hess), Joaquin Phoenix (his brother Merrill), Rory Culkin (son Morgan) and Abigail Breslin (daughter Bo) deliver 99% of the lines in the Bucks Co. farmhouse set. With limited characters and sets comes a limited requirement to develop extra characters and an ability to focus on the main characters and their story. Gibson was as good as he's ever been in a performance much more reminensicient of the solemn fathers in The Patriot and Mad Max than the crazy wildmen in Lethal Weapon, Hamlet and Braveheart.

Joaquin Phoenix will win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for his efforts in a very meaty supporting role. Phoenix has had a long acting career and with great performances in Quills and Gladiator, this kid is set for a stint atop the acting heap. Phoenix captures the confused ambiguity of a young man whose life hasn't quite worked out but is nonetheless passionate about the "right" things. He's a kid and a man and in the end, the family's moral compass.

Did I mention the camera work. Shyamalan uses numerous angles to change around point of view between narrator, human and alien. The different angles work to convey a more complete sense of what the characters are feeling. A good example of this is the view of the Hess family eating lunch in town. The point of view is from the street where Ray (played by Shyamalan) sees the family in a awkward encounter.

I don't want to give too much away but this is one big time Sci-fi movie in which you'll be relieved to not see Will Smith show up to stomp an alien. The best way to sum it up is to combine The Birds with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergiest. That would be a pretty neat movie.

Postscript
Since writing this review I've received comments on the movies mixed reviews. Roger Ebert is a big fan , James Berardinelli is not. It seems that most complaints come from Shyamalan's religious theme but I would caution viewers to not get hung up on the religion. Signs envisions a cosmic continuim that doesn't have much to do with the black and white of organized religion.

Also, I've found that the same critics who complain about Shyamalan spend a good amount of ink comparing him to Hitchcock and Speilberg. Could it be that Shyamalan is being held to a higher standar? If I were a movie director I would hardly complain about that kind of criticism.

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