"The Village" Idiot
Category: Movies...
Posted Friday, July 30, 2004 at 01:30 PM [GMT-6]

If you want to know what Michael Moore has done in "Fahrenheit 9/11" without actually giving him your money, go see "The Village."

Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan has fabricated a film that is intellectually and emotionally dishonest, at its core, and has done so with a clever and gifted hand that toys with the audience, sometimes letting it in on the joke but most often being intentionally obscure. End the end, the joke is on us, in that the obscurity is hiding nothing that we care about.

I can't tell you anything about the plot or the premise, both of which depend all too fragilely upon the innocence of the viewer. The bright spot of the film is Bryce Dallas Howard, who is often mesmerizing as a blind-but-sighted (if you know what I mean) young woman. She's Ron Howard's daughter, of course, and the resemblance to her more famous father is striking. But Ron would never have made a movie like this.

I had hoped for so much more from Shyamalan, one of my favorite directors, and the feeling that he was sitting in the back of the theater snickering at us made it all the more disappointing.