Unbreakable
Produced by Touchstone and Blinding Edge Pictures
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Released by Buena Vista Pictures

You Can Count on Me
Produced by Cappa Production and The Shooting Gallery
Written and Directed by Ken Lonergan
Released by Paramount Classics

Last year, M. Night Shyamalan performed a minor miracle: flouting Hollywood’s policy giving the public what it’s supposed to want, he found a wav to tell a morally complex tale and, at the same time, make it a huge popular success. Using—at times strategically bending—the conventions of the traditional ghost story he gave us The Sixth Sense, an uncommonly honest narrative about a boy and a man helping one another face their mortal losses. He even dared to invoke the austere vision of classical tragedy that counsels us to come to terms with our mortal condition by choosing to accept it. Only this, the Greeks believed, can release us from death’s terrors. Shyamalan further suggested that such acceptance can be more than stoic: It can be Christian as well, for it enables us to recognize that the best way to deal with our own losses is to help others face theirs.

Executives in our popular-entertainment industry generally deem such notions insufficiently sunny. Shyamalan broke their one commandment—”Thou shalt not upset your audience”—with splendid results. And he did so without resorting to special effects, save the one he used to draw a genuinely intelligent and touching performance from his star, the usually insufferable Bruce Willis.

It’s against Shyamalan’s remarkable achievement that I want to discuss his new film, Unbreakable, which is, I am afraid, a remarkable failure. Returning with Willis once more, he has taken on even bigger game: nothing less daunting than the problem of evil theologically considered. (In a world created by an infinitely merciful, all-powerful God, how are we to explain infant leukemia, Joseph Stalin, and Nicaraguan mudslides?) To make his theology more palatable to the general audience he so clearly wants to reach, Shyamalan has chosen to dramatize this metaphysical issue within the conventions of superhero comic books. Unfortunately, his gambit seems wholly misconceived. At best, superhero stories offer little more than a cut-rate, Manichean universe of frozen either-or abstractions. Rendered in cartoon line drawings, their portraits of virtue and villainy merely gesture toward the subtle interplay of good and evil in our daily lives. It’s simply not the arena for a tumble with the problem of evil.

The narrative begins with an accident that brings together two men who have little in common but their biblically derived names. One is Elijah, played by a simmering Samuel L. Jackson. From birth, he has suffered from a condition that leaves his bones so brittle they break on the slightest impact. Having spent his childhood alternating between immobilizing plaster-casts and painful physical therapy, he has become obsessed with invulnerable superheros. As an adult, he makes his living running a gallery selling the work of comic-book illustrators. He doesn’t deal in the mass-produced comics themselves but the artists’ original pencil-and-pen drawings. The other man is David Dunn, an unassuming security guard played by Bruce Willis with the brooding bafflement of a decent man who has yet to find his life’s purpose. Elijah seeks him out when he learns he has survived a catastrophic train wreck. Though all the other passengers were critically maimed or killed, David has emerged unscathed. Elijah becomes convinced that David has special powers, the kind he believes somehow inspire the intuitive imaginations of comic-book artists. As he explains, he’s been “looking for someone at the other end of the spectrum ” from his all-too-vulnerable self, “a person put here to protect the rest of us.” In other words, a superhero. Not surprisingly, David initially rejects Elijah’s the art dealer is either delusional or trying to scam him. But Elijah pierces his skepticism when he asks him if he’s ever been sick or injured. David can’t remember. He asks his boss and then his wife. Neither recalls him ever taking a single sick day. (This is one of the film’s many annoying implausibilities. I don’t mean the superpowers. For the story’s sake, I’m fully ready to believe in such gifts. But a man who cannot recall whether he has ever broken his radius ulna or come down with the flu? Please. We might forget what we ordered at the restaurant three months ago, but not if it gave us food poisoning.)

Step by step, David becomes aware that he is different after all. His adoring son, Joe (Spencer Treat Clark), becomes convinced even sooner. Without letting David know, Joe loads up his father’s barbell with far more weight than he’s used to. David only discovers this as he successfully bench-presses the bar. Surprised by his strength, he has the boy add more and more weight. To his amazement, he soon finds he’s pressing 350 pounds. (Another implausibility. Would a responsible father such as David permit his ten-year-old to load a barbell, especially one resting precariously on a weight bench? Would he lift it without checking the weight?)

Such gaffes mar the film again and again, undermining our willingness to suspend our disbelief In his rush to grapple with his theme, Shyamalan has neglected the basic principles of storytelling: The stranger your premise, the more convincing your details must be.

As for his theme, the problem of evil, Shyamalan has seriously overreached himself. Many artists have foundered on the same rock, of course, including those working in forms far more congenial to theological reflection than film. Think of Milton’s struggle to put Satan in perspective.

While I applaud Shyamalan’s desire to justify the way’s of God to man, he needs to find a better vehicle than the comic book to do it, especially given his predilection for the somber, deliberate style that worked so well within the ghost story conventions of The Sixth Sense. Applied to superhero antics, this approach can’t help but seem leadenly pretentious. In an early scene, Elijah refuses to sell an original hand-drawn portrait of a superhero to a customer who intends to give it to his ten-year-old as a gift. With offended dignity, he angrily points out that, although such drawings are made to be translated into the cheaply colored panels of comic books, they themselves are nevertheless genuine works of art. At first, Shyamalan seems to be using the incident to reveal Elijah’s obsessive nature. On reflection, however, I suspect the episode is his way of cordoning off his film from other superhero movies. Batman, we are to understand, is a vulgar live-action cartoon, while his film is genuine art. Such high mindedness is the flaw of a young man, and I hope the 30-year-old Shyamalan will outgrow it. There’s nothing more aesthetically fatal.

If Unbreakable reveals Shyamalan’s callowness, it also displays his ambition. How many other directors would dare to take on the issues he has? On these grounds alone, his film is worth viewing, despite its faults. Frankly, I’m hoping it’s a commercial success. He deserves more turns at bat, but he may not get them if this film doesn’t make money. Ideally, it will turn a modest profit, just enough to encourage his backers to fund another project on a smaller budget. Given the excesses on display in Unbreakable, I suspect he may need the discipline of a lean budget, which will force him to forgo special effects and rely on his ability to use the medium’s own resources inventively. And knowing his script will appear before the world undisguised by big-budget frills, he’ll be motivated to take more pains with his writing.

The low-budget independent film You Can Count on Me proves the point. Like Unbreakable, it also begins with a fatal accident; this one, however, leads to a far more compelling drama, without a special effect in sight. The film opens with a husband and wife driving home at night. Suddenly, their car swerves and collides with a truck, instantly orphaning their two young children. The film then jumps ahead 18 years to pick up the lives of the siblings as young adults.

Both have grown up profoundly marked by their loss, but like orphans everywhere, they are unwilling or unable to talk about it, even to each other. Their silence serves to reveal how profoundly their parents’ deaths have haunted them every day of their lives. It’s as though they have been knocked permanently off balance, perpetually unable to find the floor beneath their feet—a condition that has led them to make one ill-advised choice after another.

Now in her early 30’s, Sammy (Laura Linney), the sister, has chosen an outwardly conventional life. She lives in her parents’ house and works in the local bank in a small New York village. Rut all is not well. Her husband has left her, and she is rearing their eight-year-old son on her own. Her brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo), now in his late 20’s, has become a drifter, picking up day labor from Alaska to Florida and getting himself arrested for brawling in bars. He doesn’t help his case by smoking pot regularly and vegging out whenever there’s a television to watch.

Despite their evident differences, these siblings are much more alike in their pain and uncertainty than either realizes.

Sammy strives for order and respectability but carries on in quite a disorderly—not to say disreputable—fashion. Although she has an intimate relationship with Bob (Jon Tenney), who loves and wants to marry her, she starts an affair with her new boss, Brian (Matthew Broderick), an insecure martinet with a very pregnant wife. Realizing her behavior is less than appropriate, she visits her minister, Ron (played with marvelously comic sobriety by writer-director Ken Lonergan). What, she wants to know, is the Church’s current position on fornication and adultery? He answers with measured hesitance: “Well, it’s a sin; but we don’t focus on that aspect of it.” He then asks about the “context” of her behavior, but she tells him she would prefer he chastise her. Ron refuses to bite. Seeing no alternative, she explains what prompts her liaisons with the two fellows. “I feel sorry for them; isn’t that ridiculous?” Yes, it is; but it also makes sense in light of an earlier moment. Feeling restless one evening, she had called Bob. When he answered, she asked—without introducing herself—”What are you wearing?” Although she meant the question to be seductive. Bob heard it quite differently. After a perplexed pause, he ventured “Mom?” This is more than a joke; it reveals Sammy’s need to mother men, especially sufferers and losers. Her own loss has left her preternaturally alert to pain in others, and she feels compelled to remedy it in any way she can.

This is why she is so disappointed with Terry when he comes home from his wanderings. After she’s spent days preparing for his return—cleaning, cooking, and reminiscing—he rejects her mothering. He would prefer cash instead. He’s gotten a girl pregnant and needs to “fix” the situation. As we watch him reluctantly reveal this, we shrink from the spectacle of Sammy’s discomfiture. As things turn out, however, Terry does submit to a good deal of mothering after all. In his absence, his girlfriend attempts suicide, and her father makes it forcefully clear that he’s no longer welcome. At Sammy’s insistence, he agrees to move back into their parents’ home with her until he can regain his composure.

At this point, we would expect a half dozen emotional showdowns followed by a cleansing resolution of lifelong tensions, but this is not Lonergan’s way. Instead, he has chosen to show these people in all their ordinariness, including their confusion and inarticulateness. They lack the heroic force for mold-breaking catharsis. What they do have is the mystery of their love for one another, however inexpressible and thwarted it may be.

Lonergan’s film features fine performances by all, especially Linney, Ruffalo, and Tenney. With an unforced, all-too-believable narrative, he poignantly reminds us of life’s remorseless consequences.