The Village (film)

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The Village
The Village Theatrical Poster
Directed by	M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by	Sam Mercer Scott Rudin M. Night Shyamalan
Written by	M. Night Shyamalan
Starring	Bryce Dallas Howard Joaquin Phoenix Adrien Brody
Music by	James N. Howard featuring Hilary Hahn, violinist
Cinematography	Roger Deakins
Editing by	Christopher Tellefsen
Distributed by	Touchstone Pictures
Release date(s)	July 30, 2004
Running time	108 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	- Production - 71.6 million USD - Marketing - 40 million USD
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

The Village is a 2004 film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan that explores the dynamics of an insular turn-of-the-20th-century village and the collective fears of its members. The movie was shot in recreation of a 19th-century village outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, following Shyamalan's penchant for staging his films near his home town. Like most of Shyamalan's films its plot is built around a twist ending. The movie opened to mostly negative reviews and was not as financially successful as some of Shyamalan's earlier movies.

1 Plot
- 1.1 Explanation of the storyline
2 Production
3 Criticisms and reviews
- 3.1 Controversy
4 Box office
5 Cast
6 Awards and nominations
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Plot

The film opens on the funeral of a child in a small village. The death date on the tombstone establishes the date as 1897. As the story progresses, it is revealed the villagers live in fear of nameless creatures in the woods that surround the village. They have built a barrier of oil lanterns and watch towers that are constantly manned to keep watch for Those We Don't Speak Of. It is explained that the villagers have a long-standing truce with Those We Don't Speak Of; the villagers do not go into their woods, and the creatures do not enter their village. Even so, dead, skinned bodies of small animals are starting to appear around the village.

After the death of the child, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks the Elders (the village's governing leaders) for permission to pass through the woods to get medical supplies from "the towns". His request is denied and, later, he is admonished by his mother, Alice (Sigourney Weaver), for wanting to go to the towns, which the villagers describe as "wicked places where wicked people live". It is revealed in that scene that the Elders seem to keep dark secrets of their own in the form of black boxes, the contents of which they keep hidden from their own offspring. After Lucius makes a short venture into the woods the creatures leave warnings around the village in the form of splashes of red paint (referred by the villagers only as "the bad color") on all the villagers' doors.

Meanwhile, Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), the blind daughter of the head elder, Edward Walker (William Hurt), informs Lucius that she has strong feelings for him, and he returns her affections. They arrange to be married, but things go horribly wrong when Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), a friend of Ivy and Lucius who is mentally disabled and apparently enamored of Ivy, jealously attacks Lucius with a knife, seriously wounding him.

Edward goes against the wishes of the other Elders, agreeing to allow Ivy to pass through the forest and seek out medicine for Lucius. Before she leaves, the first plot twist is revealed when Edward explains the secret of the creatures—they are fabrications created by the Elders in an attempt to keep any of their children from leaving the village. He does mention, however, that he had heard rumors of "real creatures" living in the woods.

While Ivy is traveling through the forest, one of the beasts suddenly attacks her. She cunningly tricks it into falling into a deep hole where it is killed by the fall. It is then that the second plot twist is revealed—the creature is actually Noah in a creature costume that he had found under the floor of the room he had been locked in. It is implied in that scene that it has been Noah skinning the animals all along.^[1]

Ivy eventually finds her way to the edge of the woods, where she encounters a large wall. After she climbs over the wall the final plot twist is revealed—the film is set in the present day (a newspaper in one scene shows July 30, 2004, the date of the film's release). A park ranger, Kevin, driving a Land Rover with the words "Walker Wildlife Preserve" on the side spots Ivy and is shocked to hear that she has come out of the woods. After hearing Ivy's last name is "Walker", he agrees to help her.

Once Ivy has the medicine she is looking for, she returns to the village with the medicine, and to Lucius's side. This sequence is intercut with brief segments showing the Elders opening their black boxes, which are revealed to contain mementos from their lives in the outside world, including one or more items related to the traumatic events in their past. The film ends on Ivy saying, " I'm back Lucius".

[edit] Explanation of the storyline

It is revealed that the village was actually founded some time in the late 1970s, when Edward Walker, professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, approached other people he met at a grief counseling clinic after his father had been murdered in a violent crime. He asked them if they wished to join him in "an idea" he had. From this apparently grew "the village", a secluded town in the middle of a wildlife preserve purchased with Edward's dead father's fortune, a place where they would be protected from any aspect of the outside world, even airplanes (Kevin's superior, who can briefly be seen in a reflection as being Shyamalan himself, puts forward the information that the government is bribed to keep the entire wildlife preserve a "no-fly-zone"). Once the village was created, it appears the original "elders" rolled the clock back to what they thought was a simpler, more peaceful time.

[edit] Production

The film was originally titled The Woods, but the name was changed because a film directed by Lucky McKee, The Woods, already had that title.^[2] Like other Shyamalan productions, this film had high levels of secrecy surrounding it, needed to protect the expected twist ending that was a known Shyamalan trademark. Despite that, the script written by Shyamalan for this film was stolen over a year before the film was released, prompting many "pre-reviews" of the film on several Internet film sites^[3]^[4] and much fan speculation about plot details. Most of the movie was filmed in several fields south of Chadds Ford Pennsylvania, following Shymalan's predilection for staging his plots and filming his movies in or near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The village seen in the film was built in its entirety in one field. Another field contained an on location temporary sound stage.^[5]

Production on the film started in October 2003 with delays because some scenes needing fall foliage could not be shot because of a late fall season. Principal photography was wrapped up in mid December of that year. In April and May of 2004, several of the lead actors were called back to the set. Reports noted that this seemed to have something to do with a change to the film's ending,^[6]^[7] and, in fact, the film's final ending differs from the ending in a stolen version of the script that surfaced a year earlier.

[edit] Criticisms and reviews

The movie received mostly negative reviews.^[8] Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote: "The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn ... To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore." There were also comments that the film, while raising questions about conformity in a time of "evil", did little to "confront" those themes.^[9] Slate's Michael Agger commented that Shyamalan was continuing in a pattern of making "sealed-off movies that fell apart when exposed to outside logic."^[10]

The movie did have a number of admirers. Critic Jeffrey Westhoff commented that though the film had its shortcomings, these did not necessarily render it a bad movie, and that "Shyamalan's orchestration of mood and terror is as adroit as ever".^[11] Philip Horne of the Daily Telegraph in a later review noted "this exquisitely crafted allegory of American soul-searching seems to have been widely misunderstood".^[12]

The film also was noted for Bryce Dallas Howard's performance as Ivy Walker, which received award nominations from the Online Film Critics Society and others.^{[citation needed]} The soundtrack by Newton-Howard has also been widely praised, and had the honor of being nominated by The American Film Insitute as one of the Best Film Scores.

[edit] Controversy

Simon & Schuster, publishers of the 1995 children's book Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, claimed that the film had stolen ideas from the book.^[13] The book had a plot which features a village whose inhabitants pretend to be living in the 1830s when the year is actually 1996. The plot of Shyamalan's movie had several similarities to the book. Both involve an 1800s village which is actually a park in the present day. Both have young heroines on a search for medical supplies. And both have adult leaders bent on keeping the children in their village from discovering the truth.

[edit] Box office

Despite bad reviews and a rapidly falling off box-office the film ended up pulling in a modest $114 million, although when compared to its $71.6-million production cost and $40-million advertising campaign it probably failed to make a profit on its opening run. It went on to collect another $140 million worldwide^[14].

[edit] Cast

As is usual in his films, M. Night Shyamalan is seen in a brief cameo. In one of the final scenes his voice is heard for a time and his reflection can be seen.

Actor/Actress	Role
Bryce Dallas Howard	Ivy Elizabeth Walker
Joaquin Phoenix	Lucius Hunt
Adrien Brody	Noah Percy
William Hurt	Edward Walker
Sigourney Weaver	Alice Hunt
Brendan Gleeson	August Nicholson
Cherry Jones	Mrs. Clack
Celia Weston	Vivian Percy
John Christopher Jones	Robert Percy
Frank Collison	Victor
Jayne Atkinson	Tabitha Walker
Judy Greer	Kitty Walker
Fran Kranz	Christop Crane