Opposite of blurt
You know what I like about M. Night Shyamalan's movies? They're the opposite of blurt. Blurt proceeds from the notion that all a screenplay needs is one really good catch phrase, with the rest of the dialogue cut and pasted out of magazine self-quizzes. Blurt explains really obvious plot points repeatedly and at length. Blurt produces characters who unfold their entire psyches in about the same time it would take most people to order at McDonald's. That moron who sits behind you in the theater and won't shut up during the movie, won't pay attention to the movie, and won't hesitate to ask complete strangers about what he doesn't understand about the movie? Blurt takes that guy, clones him, and makes him the star of the show. Love Shyamalan's films or hate them, they are at least the opposite of blurt. When all becomes clear (or if you prefer, obvious) at the end, the revelations have the credible weight of time well spent, of expression earned through difficulty and struggle.

I could express my disappointment in Shyamalan's latest film, The Village, by complaining that it isn't scary, and it isn't. I could ascribe my inability to accept his latest Big Twist Ending to the law of diminishing returns: when the unexpected comes to be expected, it's not unexpected anymore. More than anything else, though, The Village rubs this guy wrong because it is uncharacteristically soft on blurt. It lacks the carefully chosen words and minutely detailed moods that stamp Shyamalan's films as uniquely his. It isn't patient enough with its own story to tell it well.

Maybe a little blurt
It must be admitted that the movie is in part about blurt, and helpfully reminds us that blurt isn't always bad. When Kitty Walker (Judy Greer) declares her voluble love to an amusingly sullen Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), her heartbroken sob-fest is played mostly for laughs. Bad blurt, bad bad blurt. Lucius treats Kitty's confession with such disdain because he's sweet on her younger sister Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard). He can't say so, but she knows. Using a modified form of blurt, Ivy eventually draws Lucius's heart into words. Howard shines in her first major role, and Phoenix so awkwardly breaks his character's reticence that it's both believable and charming when he declares his love half out of exasperation. See, this is going well. Blurt isn't so bad after all. I can hardly wait for that date montage, with the hot dog stand and the beach, and then the raccoon from the dumpster mauls them and they make goo-goo eyes while they give each other rabies shots.

There is, thankfully, no date montage, but a more plausible and less raccoon-intensive tragedy does strike. Without giving too much away, Ivy must brave the woods around her isolated community to retrieve medicine from the outlying towns. Her task is complicated by the fact that she is blind, and that the woods are chock-full of "those we must not speak of," feral creatures cloaked in red. Their red cloaks do not have "Future Voldemorts of America" stitched on them, but maybe they should. These creatures have recently broken a long, uneasy truce with The Village, and have started killing and skinning livestock. They are, in short, a good reason to avoid the woods.

Ivy's challenge is different from those faced by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and Mel Gibson in Signs. Both of those previous characters had to accept unusual talents they had sought to deny, and both were changed as a result. Ivy is admirable, but she isn't tested in quite the same way. Her struggle is more with external circumstances than with her inner life, and the movie suffers as a result. The conflict is only costume deep.

Okay, some bad blurt
Even so, Ivy's foray into the woods might have made for compelling viewing. We just don't see that much of this journey, though. The story keeps cutting back to The Village, and any time Ivy isn't on the screen, bad blurt prevails. The Village elders have a secret, but the ways in which they talk around this secret are barely suggestive, let alone interesting. A lot of the dialogue sounds like Amish magnetic poetry. William Hurt, as Ivy's father, is saddled with a lot of long and blurty speeches about the ideals of his quaintly isolated community, and the danger of the towns, but the oratory rings strangely thin. Little do we know (or do we?) that this is all meant to set up the inevitable Big Twist. I'm usually on board with Shyamalan's use of the Big Twist. The big twist in The Sixth Sense, for example, makes the world of that movie much stranger but also improbably more whole. In The Village, by contrast, the twist changes the world of the film entirely and not at all convincingly. Instead of feeling tricked but entertained, I felt cheated. It could be argued that the Big Twist brings an ominous whiff of Kafka to the closing scenes, but that would be giving the movie more credit than it has really earned.

It's a little too easy to pick apart a film in the mundane light of day. I've had students do that very thing to Signs, which I really enjoyed. Better, or at least more generous, to judge a film by how believable it is while you're watching it. Shyamalan's previous movies (with the exception of the last ten minutes of Unbreakable) pass this test. The Village, regrettably, does not.