THE SIXTH SENSE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Hollywood Pictures/Spyglass Entertainment Director: M. Night Shyamalan Writer: M. Night Shyamalan Cast: Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Olivia Williams, Haley Joel Osment
How strange that Halloween occurs each year during the fall season when everyone knows that ghosts much prefer the steamy summer nights for their hauntings. Kids whose parents need a rest are sent to camp in July where they sit around the campfire on Sunday night listening to stories of goblins and ghosts and monkeys' paws and witches. If they don't have their share of such tales, their counselors fill them in on Tuesdays after the canteens are loaded and blankets are drawn in the cool mountain air. Those not fortunate enough to be in the country or to be eight or nine years old settle into the seats at the local megaplex, giving what little imagination they have left in the TV age to the literalness of the movie screen. There the fanciful phantoms and spirited scepters glide across huge Gothic estates or suburban ranch homes, seen only by those of us still young enough to possess inventive intuition. In Jan De Bont's "The Haunting," nothing is left to the resourcefulness of our own minds as a purgatory as literal as a medieval painting passes before our eyes. Apparitions of children drift across bedsheets while a gruesome old man comes to life from a picture to continue tormenting the wage slaves he drove to their deaths. In Myrick and Sanchez's "The Blair Witch Project," the special f/x guy takes a break as three 20-somethings roam across a sylvan expanse followed and presumably devoured by invisible entities that no one ever sees. M. Night Shyamalan takes a middle ground in "The Sixth Sense," a story about an eight-year-old lad with paranormal powers that seems to be have been made not so much to scare the audience but to provide a testing ground for Bruce Willis. Will this actor, already among the highest paid in history for his profession, be able to parlay his against-type role as a passive, shellshocked, reclusive Kentucky uncle in Norman Jewison's "In Country" into yet a broader range of portrayals?
Unfortunately Willis--who enjoys a role as child psychologist that could have been imbued with resonance and even transcendence--confuses enervation with kindness and understanding. A lame, rambling script and weak direction from M. Night Shayamalan--whose "Praying with Anger" deals with a U.S. exchange student who returns to India as a stranger in his own land--sucks the potential vigor out of this film, giving it about the same makeup and density as the sickly looking, watery glass of skim milk that makes its gruesome appearance twice in the 114-minute tale.
The one arresting concept in Shayamalan's screenplay is the role reversal. Recalling the notion, "physician, heal thyself," what ultimately materializes from the long sessions between psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) and the little guy who seems to be his sole patient, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is a counter-transference. As disturbed and fearful as the psychic boy may be, the mature adult analyzing him is plagued with guilt for ignoring his lovely wife Anna (Olivia Williams), seemingly driving her into the arms of her co-worker Sean (Glenn Fitzgerald). At one point, he has even forgotten his anniversary date with his wife in a plush Italian restaurant: when he turns up, she has already finished her dinner, signed the check, and leaves without speaking or even looking at the poor man.
Just as Willis's character, Uncle Emmett, has become a passive loner in Norman Jewison's "In Country," in "The Sixth Sense" his life takes a bad turn when he is shot in the stomach by an intruder, Vincent Gray (Donnie Wahlberg), whom he recognizes as a patient he was unable to help. Though he has soon recovered from his wound, he is scarred emotionally and determined to relieve his guilt by helping little Cole. Cole sees dead people everywhere, people he insists do not even know that they're deceased. In one case he uses his psychic sixth sense to discover that a young girl, Kyra (Mischa Barton), has been slowly poisoned by her mother. In another, he is riding in the family car with his perpetually distracted mother, Lynn Sear (Toni Collette), and informs her that a woman two blocks ahead has been killed in an accident. While his apparent powers frighten his mother, who believes the kid simply has a vivid fantasy life, they do not win him friends at school. He drives his civics teacher, Stanley Cunningham (Bruce Norris), off the wall by reminding him openly that when Cunningham was a kid, he was called "stuttering Stanley." Nor can the teacher accept Cole's knowledge of history when the boy insists that centuries ago, the building in which the school is now housed was the scene of a hanging.
The movie springs to sudden life during its final fifteen minutes, too late, of course, to redeem the screenplay which plods along at a torpid pace as if Willis wants to show his public that he can be more arty than he was in the "Die Hard" series. He does not play one of those non-directive therapists who sit and say nothing for entire sessions, but in fact conducts a great deal of amiable conversation with his patient--becoming the only person the kid believes can help him. Despite this verbal activity, he appears to sleepwalk through the role as he tries to reclaim the kid, as though a low-key operation is coincident with serious acting.
Haley Joel Osment, who has been a thesp since the age of five, is unusually perceptive, pursuing his character with a serious face and morbid demeanor throughout. His relationship with a mother who is so busy with her two jobs that she absentmindedly tosses her dirty laundry over the family Husky tugs at the heartstrings. You feel for the boy and mother who are trying every so much to connect, if only little Cole can reveal to her a particular secret that no one else grasps. But the movie, devoid of terror, a palpable sense of torment, and just plain energy, fizzles along, becoming effervescent too little too late.
Rated PG-13. Running Time: 114 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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