Cheap Thrills and Grand Emotions

M. Night Shyamalan, in his guise as pop (and populist) narrator, resembles a demagogic political campaigner. He’s got his audience’s crude appetites sussed, so his fake sincerity appeals to their delusion of sophistication. The teenage siblings in Shyamalan’s new film, The Visit, stand in for today’s popular audience. Sent by their mother to visit grandparents they had never met (“We don’t know their proclivities”), Becca and Tyler (Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould) take cameras everywhere they go, recording everything as if in stream of consciousness.

This all-eyes variation on “Hansel and Gretel” shows Shyamalan copying the found-footage genre of low-budget, low-intelligence thrillers that fascinate thrill-hungry moviegoers every season. Cinema gets lowered into surveillance footage and, in just the same way as viewers wait for things to go bump in the night, Becca and Tyler spy on their Nana and Pop Pop’s strange nocturnal doings: naked romps, sobbing, vomiting jags, suicide attempts — and probable murders. When a Hollywood hack starts to imitate his imitators, film culture slows into a rut of bad taste.

Instead of updating the Brothers Grimm’s classic, folkloric projection about world experience, family, and the unknown, Shyamalan cheapens the basic fear of aging and death (themes parsed so beautifully in Zhang Yimou’s family film Coming Home; see below). He demagogues the same infantile, tell-me-a-story impulse that made a hit of The Sixth Sense in 1999 (prompting Newsweek to erroneously crown Shyamalan “The New Spielberg”). But that impulse has been corrupted. Narrative itself, in this so-called “golden age” of TV, has shriveled into lurid, cynical “content.” Shyamalan’s hackneyed storytelling depends on Becca and Tyler’s exceptional naïveté and gullibility and on their being stuck in improbable spaces. (By repeating the child-into-an-oven gimmick, Shyamalan abandons its mortal suggestion and cautionary power.)

#related#The Visit is a blatant attempt to regain the industry standing Shyamalan lost after his stunts became predictable in a series of flops (including 2013’s After Earth, a sci-fi film that dealt unexpectedly with genetic memory, family sensibility, and social heritage — the most interesting movie of his career). Shyamalan assumes that enough time has passed that a new generation might be susceptible to his old shameless scare tactics and trick endings. (The Visit’s ludicrous premise recalls Spike Lee’s heinous Red Hook Summer, in which a child is sent to visit a known-pedophile grandparent.) That Shyamalan’s cynicism might prove right is what’s most hair-raising about The Visit and its implications for contemporary pop culture.

Like their ticket-buying counterparts, Becca and Tyler are media geeks without savvy. Their technical sophistication is no sophistication, since they remain as incurious and insensitive as Shyamalan himself about compassion or spiritual connection. “We’re looking for visual tension; things that force us to imagine what’s going on beyond the frame,” Becca says. Yet Shyamalan himself never knows exactly where to put the camera — or why. Like a demagogue, he simply wants audiences to be scared, to scream, and not to think.

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Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home depicts demagoguery as tragedy. Its treatment of China’s 1970s Cultural Revolution centers on the damage suffered by a family when the young father, Lu (Daoming Chen), is sent to a political prison, and the mother, Feng (Li Gong), raises their daughter, Dan Dan (Huiwen Zhang), in the tyrannical environment that becomes their spiritually hostile home.

Not to be confused with the 1978 Jane Fonda film Coming Home, Zhang’s film shows the deep pain that Mao’s regime caused to the characters’ beings. The political disillusionment here is no less sentimental than Fonda’s, but it is even more emotionally effective — focusing on Dan Dan’s ruined personal ambitions (she once danced in the ballet corps of The Red Detachment of Women), Feng’s passionate fidelity under her strictures as a schoolteacher, and Lu’s undying devotion as a prison escapee and then as a “rehabilitated” comrade.

Zhang (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) outclasses American filmmakers who brazen obvious political positions. Through art-film mastery, he comments on politics usings cultural references and refined, symbolic technique. The ballet scenes intensify both mass indoctrination and personal aspiration; and to convey a loyal family dynamic, Zhang demonstrates a virtuosic command of melodrama. Several extraordinary montages intercut the principals in separate spaces responding almost telepathically to each other and their conflicting emotions. It is precisely the kind of thing Shyamalan can’t do.

These near-silent sequences (except for nuanced music) recall D. W. Griffth’s eloquence. Zhang shifts from a closed door, a stairway hiding place, a note hastily slid beneath the door, so that each shot rings with complicated emotion. Similar contrapuntal narration, during Lu’s train-station homecoming, offers ecstatic feeling and observation — of both individual defiance and a commonweal of repressed eyewitnesses.

With such visual fluency, Zhang balances the differences in political response by generation and even over time. When Feng displays what is diagnosed as “psychogenic amnesia,” Zhang depicts fascism as a trick of the mind imposed on instincts, will, and behavior. There is classic humanism in Lu’s attempts at reviving Feng’s love (a redacted family album, a piano-tuning ruse, and a letter-reading ploy that evokes Spielberg’s great letters sequence in The Color Purple as though viewed through the other end of a telescope — coolly).

Despite these grand emotions, Coming Home is an intimate national epic. In Dan Dan’s living-room performance of Red Detachment, we see that her dance memory (like the family’s regret and stymied, steadfast love) is never totally lost. Ambivalent politics may be the best we can expect from China, but the political vision of Coming Home, as in Lu and Feng’s unforgettable final shot, is emotionally clear. The image is Beckett with soul.