Flak Magazine: Review of The Sixth Sense, 8-12-99

The great bane of serious Hollywood “dramas” is sentimentality, although neither Hollywood nor the viewing public would recognize it as such. Studios pump it out and audiences gobble it up. Although little more has to be said than Patch Adams, it certainly can be: How about Mr. Holland’s Opus, Jack and Simon Birch?

Those three films are from Disney imprint Hollywood Pictures, the great repository of sentimentality. It’s as if Tab had grossly overestimated its market appeal, tried to reduce warehouse costs by selling off its saccharine-laden syrup and found a buyer at Hollywood Pictures. Seriously. Scientists have shown that many of Hollywood Pictures’ releases have caused cancer in lab rats.

This history gives the studied cinephile pause when approaching Hollywood Pictures’ latest, The Sixth Sense. A boy who’s Different. A man whose Life is Falling Apart. Grown-ups who Just Don’t Understand.

Before praise can adequately voiced for The Sixth Sense, then, a brief discussion of sentimentality is in order. Art, particularly narrative art, both engages our intellect and stimulates our emotions. Rapunzel’s locked in a high tower with one window? That’s horrible! She’s rescued by someone who can ensure a more prosperous life for her? That’s wonderful! (Aspersions about his motives aside.) How’d he do it? He climbed up her hair? That’s clever!

Simple stuff. A well-rendered character behaves as we expect a real person to behave under whatever peculiar stimuli the artist sets up — or, if not “expect to” (as surprise is often key), at least “understand why someone might.” And, again, these action/reaction cycles have to click with both our rational and emotional selves.

Ideally, then, we come to understand a character through sharing experiences with her or him, and when the spaghetti hits the fan, we feel for the character and when an undesirable outcome plagues her or him, we’re wrenched; when the outcome is desirable, we’re elated. Again, simple.

Sentimentality crops up when that “rationally believable” (and often “shared experiences”) part goes away. A common cop-out is to make the characters saints, or give them the most minor of flaws to overcome. These sentimental dramas are structured like porn films: problem, solution, money shot; problem, solution, money shot.

Mr.Holland’s Opus is the king of the examples here. To take an instance from the film’s middle: A child has to get better grades in band to stay on the football team but can’t find the beat. Band instructor Glen Holland helps him find the beat. The child keeps time as the marching band breaks into “Louie, Louie.” At this same parade, mere seconds after we’ve seen the little drummer boy’s cherubic face, Mrs. Holland realizes that her son is deaf. Problem, solution, money shot, problem. It’s not a rationally believable story — it’s at least six movies’ worth of stories. Rather than tell any one and tell it well, however, the filmmakers stimulate in us the emotional frisson of the successful resolution of them all without tapping any deeper emotions than those instantly provoked by these unabashedly stereotypical characters. We walk away buzzed from all the climaxes but with the other half of our mind starving.

The Sixth Sense overcomes this. It’s a brilliant story as scripted and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and if, by some miracle, you don’t yet know what the boy’s secret, I won’t spoil it (although the trailer has done just that for practically every audience this summer). In its scary moments, it’s truly terrifying in the way all these over-caffeinated kids say they wanted The Blair Witch Project to be, and it’s craftily acted by novice Haley Joel Osment as the boy and Bruce Willis as his psychiatrist (in a very literal riff on the great recurring theme of the ‘90s: You are your job).

But, chiefly, it’s emotionally real. Shyamalan takes his time telling his story, letting our impressions of the characters steep in our heads and thereby developing genuine attachment to them. It works as a drama, a mystery and a whopper of a ... well, I won’t spoil it if you don’t know. While it has a very Hollywood view of theology and sometimes toys with exploitation (of dead kids and grieving families, of all things), it remains imminently recommendable as a thriller that thrills.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)