Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: Telltale signs abound on Shyamalan’s handiwork

Friday, Jan. 10, 2003 | 9:24 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

Many years from now, when M. Night Shyamalan creates a retrospective of his own work (he strikes me as too much the control freak to allow someone else to do it), film students will ask the director to dissect the best scene from his 2002 hit "Signs": a family sitting in their car listening to what may be a conversation between extraterrestrials.

Shyamalan's staging is deceptively simple -- just four people crowding around a baby monitor -- but this is the director of "The Sixth Sense" we're talking about, and that baby monitor has profound import. The characters could be listening to sonar pings in some World War II submarine yarn -- the enemy's out there somewhere, and the characters' faces react to every little sound.

Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto provides the kicker: At the end of the scene the monitor is held aloft, against the blue sky, in defiance of the unknown.

Even if Shyamalan's memory should fail him at that future seminar, he needn't despair. He describes filming the scene in the making-of documentary on the DVD of "Signs" (Touchstone DVD, $29.99) -- lighting, camera angles, the works -- and even admits that the scene almost didn't make the final cut.

Shyamalan will have his early career mindset perfectly preserved -- but I doubt even he will be able to stand watching it, and he'll be doubly glad he didn't provide a commentary track to the DVD.

As well intentioned and entertaining as "Signs" is, Shyamalan can't explain away its two biggest flaws: an ending that doesn't fulfill the promise of everything that preceded it, and a ruinous cameo by Shyamalan himself. He brings "Signs" to a grinding halt with his first wooden line of dialogue, and subsequent lines begin to wind the film backwards; we lose the emotional rapport we had with the characters, and the ending rings false as a result.

Fortunately, there's an awful lot of good stuff before that. Dealing with a crisis of faith, lingering grief from the death of his wife and an imminent alien invasion, lapsed reverend Graham Hess is one of the most compelling characters ever to grace a science fiction film, and Mel Gibson plays him with startling openness. From the moment he awakens to find a crop circle in his cornfield, his face keeps no secrets.

Gibson's good work brings out the best in his co-stars -- the always-dependable Joaquin Pheonix, young Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, and Cherry Jones -- but the next-strongest performance in the film comes from Shyamalan's unseen alien threat. The director has internalized so much Hitchcock -- he views "Signs" as homage to "The Birds" -- that he can make nearly anything terrifying: waving stalks of corn, turning doorknobs, glasses of drinking water.

However, Shyamalan didn't write a scary science-fiction movie; he wrote a family drama with aliens, and he can't bring those two divergent paths together when it counts.

What results from Shyamalan's moralizing is an engaging but unmemorable episode of "The Twilight Zone" -- one of the episodes they don't bother to show in the marathons.

The DVD of "Signs" includes an excerpt from one of Shyamalan's early films, a shoddily made monster movie the director made in his early teens. He sets up the clip with a sheepish grin, knowing that what he's about to show isn't the work of a budding genius.

He'll no doubt wear that same grin when he introduces his cameo in "Signs" to that audience of film students many years from now, as a counterbalance to the unabashed pride he'll display when he narrates the baby monitor scene.

And perhaps by then, he'll be ready to supply the commentary track.