THE SIXTH SENSE
"Showbiz is a hideous bitch goddess"
Bart Simpson attributes that quote to George Burns, if memory serves. It seems to be the case here; the fact that moviemaking is a business reached out and kicked this perfectly good movie in the nuts, leaving me pleasantly surprised that it did so well on its opening weekend.
Trailers and ads that gave way too much away (even showing one climactic moment of the film), a super-lame title, a need to market it as a horror movie when that ain't what it is, and a premise that invites unfavorable comparison to Mercury Rising. It all had me half-expecting a real crapwagon, and I sure ain't alone in that. What I got was a real surprise.
Bruce Willis, trying very hard to atone for Armageddon, stars as Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who's about to celebrate with his wife (Olivia Williams) his acquisition of an award from the mayor of Philadelphia, when they find some maniac has broken into their house and has stripped near-naked in the bathroom. It turns out that this guy (Donnie Wahlberg, if you can believe it) was a former patient of Crowe's, and he's sobbing something about Crowe having failed him. He shoots Crowe in the gut and himself in the head.
Cut forward to next fall, when Crowe is still working with children, although what's left of his marriage (his wife had made explicit that she believed that he always put work ahead of everything, including her) is a shell of cavernous emptiness. Enter Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a little boy nicknamed "Freak" by his classmates and who has some terrible secret he won't even tell his mom (a wonderful Toni Collette). Whatever Cole's secret is, it's causing some conspicuous injuries on him and it's scaring the living crap out of him. Crowe sees a way to succeed for Cole where he'd failed for the guy in his bathroom and does his best to help, while his increasingly depressed wife starts seriously contemplating an affair with her assistant.
Written and directed by Indian filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, who deftly weaves his camera about with confidence, The Sixth Sense defies categorization, although it makes for a singularly solid piece of work with a fairly broad-based appeal. It doesn't all work - the script makes about half of the interactions between Crowe and Cole rather trite, and I think one climactic subplot involving a videotape is cruel and mean-spirited for such an ultimately gentle movie - but everything comes across well overall.
Willis is a wooden actor on his best day, but here he pulls off what he was going for in the much-inferior Mercury Rising: a genuinely sensitive guy who finds that the biggest challenges in life aren't asteroids or terrorists, but weird kids. Williams is good too, although her dialogue is minimal as she becomes increasingly depressed and withdrawn. And Collette puts in one of those performances that are so good that they kind of defeat themselves, leaving little impression because where a hundred other actresses would go into hysterics, she keeps her character's emotions a little grounded in the real world. When a doctor raisee some suspicions of abuse due to those wounds on her child, I found myself sympathetic toward her but I wasn't without suspicions of my own. This woman, for all appearances, loves her child more than anything in the world, but is she stable enough to handle him when he gets weird?
Osment is just terrific as the scared and gifted-slash-cursed little boy, never once lapsing into cutesy or cheesy "messed-up kid" clichés. His chief tormentor in school is a kid who everybody else loves because he was in a cough syrup commercial; he already talks like a Hollywood phoney, using arrogance to cover up an obvious (at least from the commercial) lack of talent. It's as if Shyamalan almost wanted to draw conspicuous attention to how good Osment's performance is; fortunately, it's not that heavy-handed.
And, if you haven't already heard, there's a bit of a surprise at the end. I don't want to spoil it, or even mention the title of the movie it reminds me of, which I recently reviewed. I just want to say that here, it's done immeasurably better, not as a throwaway plot twist but as something that really changes things. And though it depends upon contrivances that need to happen off-screen, what we see on-screen is fabulously handled by the script, director, and players. I was just impressed by this movie until the conclusion; and now, I'm immensely pleased.
This is a rare movie that I'd recommend to just about anybody. No, since it's not really a horror movie, it of course isn't half the horror movie of today's most-discussed shot-on-video megahit. But its appeal is more universal, and I found myself moved and in thought.