That's why the openly comic approach of Signs (2002) was such a satisfying next step for Shyamalan. Mel Gibson slows his timing down so that the hurting-widower gaze and the cartoony bug eyes that he used alternately in the Lethal Weapon movies merge. Gibson is woeful as all get-out as the preacher who's fallen from grace after the death of his wife, but he delicately plays the helplessness that this exposes him to in the face of an alien invasion for laughs. At times he keeps the comedy zinging just by observing how the invasion is affecting his brother and kids. Though himself a notorious true believer, Gibson daringly gives us spiritual slapstick. And he teams up wonderfully with Joaquin Phoenix as his brother, who somehow combines brute lumpishness, athletic masculinity, and childish openness, and makes this threatening, stunted young man comic. The moment when Gibson discovers his children and brother wearing the tin foil hats is as deliberately wacky as anything in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996), and funnier for being unexpected.
Signs, too, has an allegorical level of meaning--faith is for the moments that most cause you to doubt--and no, this meaning is not especially profound. But who goes to these movies with a reasonable expectation of profundity? What's important about any movie, including those that are profound, is the experience of sitting through it, how it plays. Shyamalan is an ingenious popular entertainer--when did that become an affront to critics?
What nobody has mentioned is that Shyamalan has done something new for him in The Village: at the center is a stirring love story involving Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard, and if the studio had any sense they'd be pitching the movie to women.
I can't be the only person who's always glad to see Joaquin Phoenix onscreen. The kind of young actors who get a lot of attention either have flashy technique (Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn) or are sold like reliable-but-always-updating products (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt). Phoenix hasn't received, or perhaps isn't receptive to, buff-and-polish star processing and has never had much in the way of technique. Yet he so thoroughly, so physically, imagines his way into character that there isn't a lot refined technique could do for him. When Penn's dramatic-technique switch is on, his sensitivity switch is off. Phoenix is always sensitive, and has been since his earliest adult appearances, in Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995), Inventing the Abbotts (1997), and Return to Paradise (1998). In Gladiator (2000) he drew me in playing a sadistic, incestuous, literally back-stabbing villain more than Russell Crowe did as the stolid hero (and Phoenix was totally unself-conscious about the period setting to boot, just as he was in Quills (2000)).
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