Sense-ational

The Sixth Sense was in the upper echelons of my Top 100 Movie list when I first made it many years ago. Since then, it's become fashionable to crap all over M. Night Shyamalan. Alright, I give you that The Happening was pretty lame. But it seems to me like some people are pretending they never liked Shyamalan's movies just because his first major one was so damn good.

It was good, right? The level of Shyamalan venom these days has almost made me wonder. So I decided to watch The Sixth Sense again and judge for myself.

I will admit that a lot of my instant love of the film came from the circumstances under which I first saw it back in 1999. I knew absolutely nothing about it. I was in San Diego to work Comic Con, and one night after the dealer room had closed, one of our volunteers found out that none of us had seen The Sixth Sense yet. I can't remember if it had opened the weekend before and we'd missed it being on the road somewhere else, or if it had opened the night before, and he was so affected that he could talk of little else. Either way, his message was clear: "drop everything, we're going to see The Sixth Sense." "But didn't you just see it?" "I'll go again! Right now!" It seemed impossible that a movie could live up to that kind of hype.

But it did. And then I understood why this volunteer had been so keen to get others to the movie, and so eager to see it himself for a second time. When I returned home from Comic Con just a few days later, I rushed out to watch it for myself for a second time. And perhaps more importantly, to see how others reacted to seeing it for the first time.

No one today could ever have that kind of experience seeing The Sixth Sense for the first time. Everybody knows the subject matter, the famous "I see dead people" line, the fact that there's a twist ending. Most people probably even know what the twist is before they see the film -- it's achieved an "I am your father"/"Who is Keyser Söze?" level of status in the collective consciousness. And this can only diminish the impact of seeing the movie. Fortunately, the movie works on multiple levels. It keeps on giving.

The first time I saw it, I was wowed largely because I was fooled. Most people were. I know like one person who really did guess the ending, but let's be honest -- very few of the people who claim to have done so really did.

The second time I saw it, I was wowed largely because I saw how I was fooled the first time. The movie "plays fair" at every turn. Every important scene has dual interpretations, one that supports the truth, and one that supports the mislead. It's such a carefully constructed piece of writing, I enjoyed it the second time just as much as the first, enjoying the craftsmanship.

Today, all that trickery is gone. (Although I maintain that it never felt like a trick to me.) And now I find the movie just as enjoyable on a third level -- as perfectly executed horror and emotional drama. The story of young Cole Sear is truly harrowing. This young boy has been tormented every day, from birth, by horrifying specters that assault him emotionally and physically. He has no one to confide in or help him cope; the few times he's tried to communicate his plight, he's just ended up more ostracized and worse off. And he's suffering through all this at what, age 10? 12? If you have a nurturing bone anywhere in your body, your heart goes out to him.

Meanwhile, you have his poor mother, frayed to the last of her wits. She's struggling as a single parent, working two jobs to make ends meet. She would do anything for her son. But something is clearly troubling him and he won't tell her. She can't help. And then at one point, she's even suspected of causing the trauma in his life. Again, you'd have to be heartless not to sympathize.

This is the true backbone of The Sixth Sense. And it works thanks to the phenomenal performances given by these two actors, Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette. Yes, M. Night Shymalan crafted an impeccable script, but his greatest triumph with this movie was finding and casting the child actor that could make it all work. Maybe the only child actor. And the whole movie works because this relationship between mother and son works.

These two actors achieve something so incredible that it's easy to overlook other amazing performances in the movie. Olivia Williams has the toughest job in the movie, playing Malcolm's wife Anna. She has to play a truth in every scene that the movie is trying to hide from the audience. The performance has to be honest and not give the game away. And it does. She seems a stone-cold bitch the first time through the film, and a suffering tragedy every time after.

Donnie Wahlberg. Holy crap! Utterly unrecognizable in this role, and another triumph for Shyamalan in finding and casting him. Sure, today, he's known as an actor -- and if you've seen his work, you know he's a good one. But at the time, he was a former New Kid on the Block, and nothing more. He delivers such an intense performance, in just a couple minutes of screen time, it's unbelievable. Traumatized, petrified, damaged -- again, a performance that would be the highlight of any other movie that is just one of many great performances here.

And then there's Bruce Willis. He's the star of the film, so it's perhaps weird to say that it's easy to overlook him in the movie. Yet his work is so reserved, so subtle, and so razor precise, that's the truth of it. It's no surprise to me that Shyamalan would go right back to him and cast him again for his next film.

To make a long story short (too late), this movie was no flash in the pan, no fluke. It's still one of my very favorites, an unreserved A.