It is good reviewing practice, in my opinion, to give away as little plot as possible of any movie under review. Sometimes, though, it is nigh impossible — either because one does not have much else to say about a movie, or because elements such as its ending deeply colour any evaluation of the film.
In the case of M Night Shyamalan’s keenly awaited Signs, the ending is crucial to how one sees the movie. Endings are, of course, always important, and not just for the quasi-theological reasons Frank Kermode outlined in The Sense of an Ending. When it comes to Signs, the theology is there, too, and that’s the problem.
I apologise, then, if this review gives too much away. In the case of Shyamalan’s great hit movie, The Sixth Sense, I would have resisted divulging the brilliant surprise ending even under torture. As for Signs, though, the ending is so symptomatic of what is wrong with Signs that I have to admit defeat right from the start.
Mel Gibson plays a former minister of religion — Episcopalian, I believe. That means he’s allowed to marry and have children, and to be addressed as “Father”. So his character has the dignitas of a Catholic priest without the problem of celibacy. This means the filmmaker can have his cake and eat it too. He can get the mumbo-jumbo in as well as the cutesy family stuff. Gibson himself, in real life, is of course a devout Catholic; he has been producing children to people heaven or hell with souls more assiduously, almost, than he has been producing violent right-wing movies.
And one can’t help feeling that Gibson’s own religious beliefs played some part in his taking this role. Perhaps his presence changed the shape of the movie in some way. In any event, it is Signs‘s sickly religiosity that turns it from a competent B-movie about aliens coming to Earth into a piece of Hollywood fluff with all the overloaded, unjustified sentimentality that that implies.
Gibson’s former priest, Graham Hess, has lost his faith because his wife was killed in a car accident. So far so good. People have lost their faith for less, and the loss of faith (in God, in life itself) is a valid and important issue. But of course you intuit the trajectory of the story from the start: will he get his faith back? Well, I don’t think the Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense would have been so crude as to answer that question in a simple way, but that Shyamalan seems to be on extended vacation.
Hess and family have a nice little house in the country (the reactionary American ideal) and seem to be surviving the loss of mother; Hess’s brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) has moved in to help with the kids. Then weird crop circles start to appear in their cornfields, and a child-monitoring device begins to emit odd noises. Other portents appear all over the world. What could it all mean? It means, as we eventually discover, that aliens from outer space (as opposed to aliens from over the Mexican border) are landing on Earth.
Shyamalan drags this part out, building some reasonable suspense on the way. There are a couple of good setpieces, like when the family, serendipitously joining hands as they clamber up on top of Hess’s car, hold aloft the baby monitor — and hear the aliens’ gobbledegook. There are also a number of neatly turned surprises, which I won’t divulge. But that’s about all. As the movie’s trajectory reveals itself, and we head for its tissue-wetting climax, we realise it’s going to be as soppy and as emptily heart-warming as an episode of Touched by an Angel.
And the spiritual stuff is bunkum anyway. The arrival of extraterrestrials (sadly disappointing when we do get to see them) is not a sign of God’s existence. It’s just a sign that there are extraterrestrials.
And if you find proof of God’s existence in the salvation of one particular life, you have to wonder what kind of God this is. What about all the others blitzed by aliens in Signs? (Let’s not even talk about real life or history.) Were those other squandered lives, and all that suffering, not important to God? Did the relevant relatives not pray the right prayers? Or were they just in the wrong movie?
When anti-intellectuals call artworks “pretentious”, as in bad, they sometimes mean that a work is “portentous” — that is has an inflated sense of its own importance and the weight of meaning it can carry. Signs is indubitably portentous; had Shyamalan been able to turn that portentousness into a good science-fiction thriller he would have been forgiven. But the underlying theology doesn’t work: it just adds up to mindless manipulation, and that makes it pretentious too.