Okay, so, first: let me warn you that Unbreakable has a bit of a twist ending. I will be spoiling that ending here — if “spoiling” is even possible after the passage of twelve years. You’ve been warned.
Unbreakable is probably the quietest movie on my list. People mope and stare and talk in level tones, for the most part. They look at their feet. While there is a train wreck at the beginning, it happens between cuts. The only real action sequence — which occurs very, very late in the film — mostly consists of Bruce Willis climbing out of a swimming pool. You’d be forgiven for mistakenly believing that Unbreakable isn’t a superhero movie, that it doesn’t, as a friend of mine said on Facebook, “participate in the genre conventions of the superhero.”
You’d be wrong. But you’d be forgiven.
The reality is that Unbreakable depends on the tropes and cliches of the superhero genre more than most superhero films. It’s not colorful and flashy and filled with loud violence. True. But the tropes and cliches are so important to the meaning of the film that Samuel L. Jackson, as “Mr. Glass,” the “supervillain” of the story, has to educate you about them. Most of his dialogue — including the part where he explains the twist at the end — serves to bring any non-comics-obsessed viewers up to speed on the superhero storytelling conventions that Shyamalan is hanging his story upon. It’s a superhero movie hiding in plain sight.
“In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain’s going to be?” says Mr. Glass, toward the end. “He’s the exact opposite of the hero.”
Mr. Glass, a character whose bones break easily due to a birth defect, is the exact opposite of Bruce Willis’ character, a man whose bones never break, who has never been sick a day in his life. If we had been more familiar with superhero storytelling conventions, Shyamalan seems to be saying, then the ending wouldn’t have been a “twist” at all. We’d have known not to trust Mr. Glass.
Why do I love this movie? It’s hard to say. I have to admit that it’s not a lot of fun to watch, not even at the end when it all comes together. “Fun” isn’t the goal here. Unbreakable is essentially a grown-up film about grown-up things (divorce, missed opportunities, the lies we tell those we love in order to spare them, the disappointing decline that comes with middle age) that also manages to be about all the fantasies and weird power trips I used to go on when I was a twelve-year-old boy. That’s a potent combination. That it takes both sides of that equation seriously — the adult stuff doesn’t make the childish stuff look childish, and the childish stuff doesn’t really look like an escape from the adult disappointments — is a major achievement. Forget the disappointing decline of Shyamalan himself (I expect he’ll have a comeback): Unbreakable is the real thing.
There is so much that I love about this movie–that it *does* succeed at being a superhero movie, despite the somber tone and adult themes, that it explores the difference between adolescent male power fantasy and middle-aged male power fantasy (which is precisely why it confuses some people into thinking it’s not really a superhero movie).
Where I ran into trouble is that I just couldn’t muster any interest in the failing marriage plot, which ultimately is the driving conflict of the movie, since it’s the only continuous conflict that is plainly visible to the audience prior to the big reveal at the end of the movie. I just had no desire to see Willis’ character reconcile with his wife, and since that’s his primary goal throughout the film, it limited my ability to sympathize with him. (This is a problem that I attribute to Shyamalan’s general poor writing of women characters.)
And without that marriage plot to hold the film together, it becomes a succession of independently interesting scenes that don’t really hold any sustained drama because you don’t actually know that there’s a larger conflict occurring. (The mid-life crisis aspects were more successful–and I can’t help wondering if I would appreciate that part even more if I were to re-watch it now. I was still in my late twenties last time I saw it. Now that I’m approaching 40, I expect I’ll see things differently.)
And yet the ideas behind the movie are so interesting, the the goals Shyamalan set for the movie so divergent from formulaic superheroics, that I can’t help loving it anyway.
The marriage subplot only worked for me as an emblem of the lie he has been living — he neutered himself to win that marriage. The lie about the car crash injury was the first and worst of his many compromises. The rekindling of the marriage is doomed because he — and the kid — are going to be lying to her a lot more in the coming course of his vigilante career.
I agree with all that–but I don’t think the *movie* agrees with all that. I felt like we were expected to buy the rekindled marriage as a happy ending, and the continued secrecy as having his cake and eating it too. He gets his normal life AND his super life, and we’re supposed to overlook that his dishonesty was the source of his unhappiness in the first place. The idea isn’t that the lying was wrong, just that suppressing his powers was wrong.
Unless I missed something–again it’s been a long time. Was there a detail that suggested to you that we were supposed to see the marriage as still doomed? Or is that just your own (in my opinion, quite accurate) logic?
I think the movie is ambiguous enough to support either reading.