Films: 1990s
(1999) The Sixth Sense
Thursday, October 12, 2006
The Sixth Sense
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Release: 1999
M. Night Shyamalan creates an emotional journey through a child's tale, a ghost story and a romance in "The Sixth Sense."
The film operates on multiple levels because of this narrative format, and on each level it delivers textures and themes that revolve around loss, departure and separation.
Bruce Willis plays child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, brutally attacked at home with his wife Anna (Olivia Williams) by former patient Vincent Gray (Donnie Wahlberg). Crowe's therapy did not work on Gray as a child. Gray returns to end his suffering by ending Crowe.
Crowe's survival of the attack is a tenuous thing. He is personally and professionally shattered transformed into a man whose mistakes overwhelm him. Plodding forward, Crowe is unable to communicate with Anna and lingers outside his new patient's home.
That new patient is Cole Sear (Haley Joe Osment) a preadolescent who lives with his mother Lynn (Toni Colette) in Philadelphia. Cole is closed emotionally, like Crowe, and on the outs with school, friends and, he fears, soon with his mother.
Despite their individual isolation, Crowe works his way into Cole's confidence, finding him at the places (churches, parks) where he seeks refuge from some manner of sadness and persecution. Cole possesses a preternatural perceptiveness and soon the two are circling each other, provoking each other's desire to grow and heal.
Therapy takes a dark turn, however, as Crowe gets closer to the truth inside Cole.
Cole and his mother live with strange phenomena. Drawers open, the temperature drops, and Cole is terrified by unseen forces. His behavior takes on an aggressive edge at school, at times, where he seems to be able to see into the personal past of teachers. Consequently, his peers torment him for his precociousness.
Cole reveals to Crowe that he can see the dead, who apparently move amongst the living openly - but don't know they're spirits. The two embark on a journey to understand why Cole has this power, and what the terrifying visions of dead people mean. In the process, Cole and Crowe get closer to the truth about their relationship, and about what happened on the fateful night when Gray shot Crowe for failing to heal.
Failing children is an important and repetitive motif in "The Sixth Sense." Crow fails Gray, Lynn struggles to not fail Cole. In other examples, a father fails his daughter by allowing her mother to poison her, the ghost of a suicide who used his father's gun wanders Cole's home, and then there is Cole, who becomes a child-caretaker to the lost spirits.
The apparitions and the unwrapping of the mysteries of "The Sixth Sense" are frightening - Shyamalan exhibits an affinity for shot-and-soundtrack combinations that emulate Hitchcock's audience implication (such as in Cole's tent, or in the scene during which Cole is tormented by schoolmates). He is also able to use John Carpenter's lexicon of "put the information the screen" to frighten the audience - who then know more than the characters at a given moment.
Shyamalan uses the genre as a mechanism to tell a much simpler story, however. While much of "The Sixth Sense" dwells on the ghostly and on the mystery that realm represents, its primary emotional course is set by the relationship between husband and wife, Malcolm and Anna. The ghosts, Cole and Crowe are only the avenue towards this central place in the film.
Crowe represents fatherhood curtailed - his ability to complete a family with Anna is curtailed and he spends much of the film looking for his proper place in the Crowe house after his natural arc is interrupted. By shepherding Crowe from mystified preadolescence to psychic maturity he vicariously completes his aborted journey. In doing so, he is able to reconcile his similarly severed relationship with his wife.
This is a work-versus-nurture scenario, in which Crowe's job literally destroys his marriage. It is not his fault, but it is clear that prior to Gray's attack, Anna made certain sacrifices regarding the time she spent with her husband. When he tries to pass off his city award, Anna gently admonishes him for attributing such little gravity to it. For Anna, Philadelphia's affirmation is a validation of what she says has been a career that deprived her of a partner.
During his subsequent estrangement from Anna, Crowe is blind to what prevents their communication. Only when he realizes that he must let Cole move forward without him, at the end of the film, can he return to Anna and actually speak with her (albeit, his world has shifted so radically that he must do so in a particular fashion).
Malcolm and Anna comprise the film's final moments, filling the mise-en-scen to the exclusion of all else. His final words to her, his final actions onscreen, are those of a husband loving his wife. "Good night, sweetheart," he says. The focus has shifted from his needs to hers.
Shyamalan's adoration of Philadelphia is also notable. He clearly finds the details of fountains, facades and skylines beautiful and suggests they are an embedded spiritual language. Cole's other world of visions already runs through the physical normalcy which surrounds the characters. "The Sixth Sense" does an admirable job of teasing this suggestion to the surface, as well as maintaining that real ghosts could be our relationships with loved ones, unless cared for with an intensity equal to our fear of what moves in the darkness.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
