Survivor gilt

Unbreakable is senseless

by Peter Keough

UNBREAKABLE. Directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan. With Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat Clark, and Charlayne Woodard. A Touchstone Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Flagship, Holiday, Hoyts Providence Place 16, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

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, 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 infamous 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.

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Like Alfred and Steve . . .

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