Saturday, April 23, 2011

#89 The Sixth Sense (1999)


There was a time when Y2K was a legitimate concern.  When a BlackBerry was a fruit and an iphone was a typo and a droid was a golden robot with an English accent.  When the President lied about BJ's instead of WMD's. When my friend Aaron Pierce was childless and would think nothing of running out and seeing a movie neither of us even knew anything about.  And when a wunderkind director with a funny name came out of nowhere and made one of the best movies of the decade.  His talent seemed unbreakable, and all signs pointed to him overtaking the village known as Hollywood for decades to come.  He was the shark, and the lady in the water was the old Hollywood ruling class. The hip and the happening would defeat the old and the stodgy.  Avatar.  

Plot summary (with spoilers): Dr. Malcolm Crowe and his wife Anna are drinking wine by the fire; cozy and lazy and luxuriating in one another's company.  Anna quickly and admittedly a little clunkily exposits that they've just returned from an evening out where Dr. Crowe has just won an award for outstanding achievement in child psychology or some such, and then the two of them wander upstairs to the bedroom for some post-awards show banter, and by that I mean sex.  Anna discovers the window has been broken.  They  see a shadow in the bathroom. Malcolm cautiously creeps forward and is treated to the sight of an emaciated member of the Funky Bunch in his briefs.  Malcolm doesn't recognize him, but the man tells him he's Vincent Gray, a child who used to come to Malcolm years ago for therapy and he's angry Malcolm didn't help him.  Malcolm lamely offers to help now.  Quivering, Vincent reaches behind him on the bathroom counter, and produces a gun.  He shoots Malcolm in the gut, then turns the gun on himself.
"The Next Fall"
Malcolm has fortunately recovered from his gunshot wound (phew!) and is sitting outside an apartment building.  He has a ton of notes, detailing his new client, a nine year old boy named Cole Sear, who is emotionally disturbed.  Malcolm sees Cole leave his apartment, and hug his mother goodbye.  He sees Malcolm, and quickly dashes away.  Malcolm follows him into a church.  He speaks to Cole briefly, then Cole leaves without saying goodbye.  "Am I going to be seeing you again?" he says, resigned.  Malcolm says yes.  
We meet Cole's mother, Lynn.  She sees Cole's tie for school is dirty, so she quickly dashes into the laundry room for a replacement.  When she comes back into the kitchen, every drawer is and cabinet door is open.  She lets out a startled yelp.  Cole sits quietly at the table, his hands pressed against the wood.  Lynn wills herself to be calm and asks him if he was looking for something.  Cole says no.  Cole leaves for school.  Another boy, Tommy, meets him at the corner outside the apartment, but abandons him and calls him a freak as soon as they're out of range of Lynn's view.  
Malcolm arrives at a restaurant, late for his anniversary dinner with Anna.  He makes a bad joke about not knowing which restaurant to go to, then explains about Cole and how concerned he is and how much he wants to help him.  Mean old Anna just ignores him the whole time, and even grabs the check before he does.  She looks up in irritation at him once, at the same time someone behind him laughs obnoxiously.  Then she sarcastically says "Happy Anniversary" and leaves.  Damn, what a bitch.  Am I right, fellas?  High five!
A new scene.  Lynn and Malcolm are in Lynn's house, sitting across from one another.  From the look on Lynn's face, Malcolm has just told her something about Cole she doesn't want to hear.  Cole arrives home from school, and is scared to see Malcolm there.  He ignores him and speaks to Lynn, who jokingly invents a story about how she won the lottery and quit her job today.  Cole responds that he was picked first for kickball and got a grand slam.  Lynn seems to regret starting a game where she learns that her son's wildest fantasy is to do well in kickball.  She excuses herself to make dinner, and leave Malcolm and Cole to talk alone.  (I mean, that part's implied, of course).  Cole is clearly still scared of Malcolm and won't sit down.  Malcolm assures him he can read minds.  He says that if he can guess what Cole is thinking enough times, Cole must sit and talk to him.  He makes three right guesses ("You don't think I can help you.  You have a secret.  You're afraid of people finding out") before running out of tricks and flailing wildly.  It ends with Cole leaving.  
The next day at school, the history teach tells the class that the school used to be a courthouse.  Cole adds that people were hung there.  Criminals hung from the rafters.  The teacher says that's wrong.  Cole calls him "Stuttering Stanley" over and over again, as a taunt, while covering his eyes, until Stuttering Stanley says "S-s-s-s-s-hut up, FREAK!"  Where's Geoffrey Wright when you need him?  
Emergency shrink session.  Malcolm's been called in. He claims to be a magician, and does a bad trick with a penny that he doesn't actually make disappear.  Cole's deadpan "I didn't know you were funny." makes me laugh out loud.  
Malcolm at home.  He tries to get into the basement, but the door won't work.  He feels his pockets for a key.  
He's suddenly down in the basement.  A man comes to the door, and clumsily asks Anna about on a date.  She turns him down gently.  Malcolm mumbles that he's a "cheese dick", but otherwise doesn't confront him at all.  I wonder what that's about?
A kid's in Cole's class is having a birthday party.  Cole climbs the stairs to get a balloon and hears a slave in the crawl space.  The slave wants to be let out, and is sorry for injuring the master's horse.  Two other kids see Cole trembling in fear at the doorway, and shove him into the crawlspace.  By the time Lynn investigates and breaks him out, he's passed out.  
Lynn's called Malcolm to the hospital, apparently, because they're both there next, listening to some doctor talk about the scratches on Cole's back and arms and suggesting Lynn speak to a Child Protection agent.  Both Lynn and Malcolm are disgusted.  
Malcolm's in the hospital room, talking to Cole.  He tells him that he's sorry he's not helping him.  Cole has a secret to tell.  He sees dead people.  Malcolm leaves, more disturbed than ever.  
The next night, Cole is back at home. He has to go the the bathroom in the middle of the night.  He hears his mom walk by into the kitchen.  He creeps out to see her and instead sees a woman who shouts at him and thinks he's her husband.  She threatens to kill herself, and brandishes her already deeply cut wrists.  Another boy asks Cole if he wants to see his dad's gun, before turning and exposing the back of his head is blown off. Cole's having a rough night. 
Anna's working at the jewelery store, trying to get a sale.  The groom-to-be wants a ring that's a little less pricey, but Anna's pushing hard for the expensive one.  She waxes on a bit about wedding rings and how important they are.  The guy who hit on her earlier arrives at the store and flirts some more.  Anna leans in to kiss him.  The harlot! They hear breaking glass and walk over to the door.  Malcolm has seen them and angrily stomps away before they say anything.  He goes back to Cole and says he can't help him anymore.  Cole angrily says that he didn't even try because he doesn't believe him.  
Malcolm goes down the the basement again, after struggling with the door.  He listens to old tapes of his sessions with Vincent, and with the volume all the way up, he hears a spanish man talking to Vincent, saying yo no quiero morir, I don't want to die. 
Malcolm believes Cole now, and suggests to Cole that he try listening to the ghosts to see what they want.  The next ghost Cole meets his a young girl. Cole runs from her at first, but when he doesn't chase him, he goes back to her and finds himself asking what she wants.  
What she wants is justice.  She leads Cole and Malcolm to her funeral, where she points to a box under her bed with a video tape in it.  She tells him to give it to her father.  Cole does so.  On the video, the girl is filming a puppet show.  Her mother interrupts the show to give her daughter soup.  The girl says she's feeling better now, and can she go out later?  We'll see, her mother says.  First have lunch.  She puts the soup down right in front of the camera, and puts some kind of cleaner in the soup.  
The girl's father watches on video, stunned.  He confronts his wife, who barely reacts. 
The next day at school, a woman is calmly chatting with Cole and helping him apply makeup for the school play he's in.  Stuttering Stanley enters and asks who he's talking to.  Cole says no one.  The woman casually gets up and walks away, revealing half her face is burned off.  She was a ghost, no longer spooky or alien to Cole.  After the play, Cole tells Malcolm he's helped him, and thank you.  Malcolm suggests he tell his secret to his mother now.  Cole says that they won't be seeing each other any more, will they?  Malcolm says no.  On the way home, Lynn and Cole are stuck in traffic.  Cole tells Lynn his secret.  Lynn doesn't believe him until he mentions her mother, and that her mother said that when they fought years ago and Lynn thought she had not attended her dance recital, her mother had watched from the back in secret.  
Malcolm goes home.  He sees Anna, asleep on the couch, watching their old wedding videos.  He approaches her, whispers that he's sorry he's been ignoring her.  Her hand which was clenched, falls open.  A ring falls out and lands on the floor.  Malcolm looks at his own hand.  His ring is gone!  He looks down at his shirt.  Blood pours out from everywhere.  Cole's words echo in his head, "They don't see each other.  They see what they want to see.  They don't know they're dead".  Malcolm's terrified at first, then at peace.  He needed to seek out Cole and fix him, to atone for Vincent, and now that that task is complete, he can leave in peace.  And so he does.  

Review: As flawless and tightly plotted as I remember.  It's really quite ingenious the way the story justifies itself and makes the "twist" seem organic and even vital to the story, rather than just a "hook".  The writing here is pretty good, although the dialog is sometimes a bit dicey.  Even in this first movie, Night tends to make each line sound a little fakey, a little bit too much like Holy Writ.  But the direction is...I'll just say it, Hitchcockian.  We don't actually see a ghost (aside from Malcolm) until about an hour into the movie.  Before then, it's all shadows and sounds.  And Haley Joel Osment!  My God!  I remember boldly pronouncing to anyone who would listen that this kid was the next DeNiro and Nicholson rolled into one, look out world, here he comes!  I've honestly never seen a child performance this good in my life, and very few adult ones.  He's really amazing, the boy version of Dakota Fanning.  It's heartbreaking to me that his career has fizzled.  The Puberty Tree that smacked him in the face a few dozen times is partially to blame.  The rest...I dunno.  Bad management?  Imdb says there are a couple movies coming down the pike.  Maybe he's have a resurgence in his 30's or 40's when he becomes a character actor on par with Phillip Hoffman or William Macy.  I think this movie goes from good to great because of the twist and great to damn near perfect because of little Haley Joel.  He's so vulnerable and so scared throughout the movie, that every scene is terrifying.  We're not scared for ourselves, though.  We're scared for Cole, and wondering how he's going to make it through this.  Probably my favorite scene, only a about a minute long, is when Toni Collette (also flawless) and Osment are leaving the grocery store.  Lynn is pushing Cole in the cart and both look glum and preoccupied.  Suddenly, Lynn breaks into a run.  Cole turns and looks at her, delighted, then raises his arms and looks up at the sun.  When they reach the car, she slows down.  They look at each other and smile.  Then a beat.  Then, individually, their smiles fade. Back to reality.  It got me in 1999 and it got me today.  Man.  Anyway, great movie.  Made me think warmly of M Night again, if only for a moment.  Then, my smile faded.  Back to reality.  

Stars: Five out of five.  I'd say tied with Pulp Fiction for my favorite on the list so far. 

Does it deserve "Best 100" Status: As Night might say, oui.

Next, "Bringing Up Baby" and then "12 Angry Men".  Great.  More old stuff. 




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