Phoenix is probably the best tender juvenile since Anthony Perkins or Timothy Hutton, but without the sense of sexual blockage that limited their careers. He has bluff masculinity without callouses. His boyish nerves are fully exposed, but he's too butch, and even menacing, for pathos, which could be grotesque given he can fill space like an adolescent bull. Instead, at his best, he manages to play his natural-manchild persona for comedy that is broad and yet slyly understated--he gets a big laugh in The Village just by standing stockstill and mute when the wrong girl joyously proclaims her love for him. Foolishness just seems to add to his underlying strength, and his boyishness creates drama--you want to see him grow into adult awareness and mastery of that strength.
Although Lucius Hunt, Phoenix's character in The Village, is tongue-tied, you're always aware of what he's feeling, and it's always noble without being icky. Phoenix as Lucius quietly embodies the ideal the elders created the community to foster. For her part, Howard's character Ivy Walker, who's (mostly) blind but radiantly vital, matches a popular contemporary female self-image: she's a tomboy who likes physical activity and joking but she's also somewhat helpless. Bryce Dallas is Ron Howard's daughter; growing up in a moviemaking family may account for her utter ease in front of the camera. Personality just shines off her, but she can also focus and direct it. For both Howard and Phoenix the awkward dialogue presents no bar to expressiveness.
Howard spectacularly combines self-reliance with rescue fantasies, but Shyamalan is better at filming the latter, perhaps because they tie in to male fantasies he shares. Boy, does he film them well. When the creatures interrupt a wedding, we see Ivy purposefully taken by the hand and led to safety before we see who's taken her, and yet we know it's Lucius. And the scene on the porch in which Ivy's teasing and Lucius's own emotion sweep him past his inarticulateness is one of the most stirring declarations of love I know of. Phoenix gives it the force of an outburst, a breakthrough into the kind of romantic bond we dream of.
Lucius's declaration is so simply shot and surprisingly potent it's possible that Shyamalan himself didn't know what he was going to get from Phoenix--it feels like an upsurge of naked emotion. By the end, however, it's Ivy who has to undertake a quest through the threatening woods to save Lucius. The female version of the journey-as-ordeal is not unheard of in romance: the most realistic and the most powerful may be Jeanie Deans's walk to London in Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian (based on the historical, and aptly named, Helen Walker), the best known nowadays, and the most fantastic, Dorothy's journey to the Wizard of Oz. This narrative trope also includes Little Red Riding Hood, Little Nell on the road with her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop, Eliza's dash across the frozen river in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Scarlett O'Hara's arduous return to Tara from Atlanta with the postpartum Melanie in the wagon in Gone With the Wind, and Katharine Hepburn's transformative river voyage in The African Queen.
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