Unbreakable
M. Night Shyamalan's superb take on a comic book movie
Directed By: M. Night Shyamalan
Other Notable Films From Shyamalan: The Sixth Sense, Signs, Split
Starring: Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson, Robin Wright
Screenplay By: M. Night Shyamalan
Movie Synopsis: A comic book collector attempts to convince a security guard that he’s a real-life superhero.
Signature Line: “They called me Mr. Glass.”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
The first time I watched Unbreakable, I wasn’t actually intending to watch Unbreakable. The way it happened was:
It was August of 2001, and Larami and I—college sophomores who’d been dating for about a year at that point—had just moved into our first shared apartment. I was hooking up the TV and the DVD player while she was at work, and I needed to put on a movie to make sure I’d gotten all the wires right. I reached toward a stack of DVDs my parents had gotten us as a housewarming gift and blindly pulled one out. It was Unbreakable.
I turned on the TV and the DVD player, inserted the movie, clicked play, and then waited. The first 50 or seconds, which showed producer credits and a title card, were completely silent, and so I figured I must’ve not fully connected the audio wires. And then I heard a baby crying.
It was soft at first, and played over an all-black screen, like its presence was being eased onto me. Then, in gradation, the crying grew louder, and more pained, and more urgent. I thought some version of “Well, I at least gotta see what this baby is crying about,” and then settled into the spot I was sitting on on the floor in front of the TV (which was also on the floor).
The movie faded into view: A woman—young, Black, glowing with new-mother joy and pride—had just unexpectedly given birth to a baby in a department store dressing room in 1961 Philadelphia, and an off-the-clock doctor was being escorted in to tend to her. The scene, which was two minutes long, was filmed in a single, unbroken shot wherein the camera panned slowly from person to person, making use of the large dressing room mirror to get the coverage it needed.
The opening established the movie quickly as moody, and mysterious, and, ultimately horrifying, when the doctor realized the reason the baby was crying so aggressively was because each of his arms and legs were broken. I was immediately hooked.
I didn’t move from that spot for the rest of the movie’s 106-minute runtime. I just sat there on the floor, in front of a perfectly good thrift store couch, completely transfixed. As soon as it was over, I played it again. And then as soon as Larami got home from work, I asked her to watch it with me, too.
It’s easy to get caught up in a movie when you’re watching it on a 65-foot wide theater screen on a Friday night with 200 other people.
Only the very best, most immersive, most confident one, though, can grab hold of you that same way when you least expect it—like the middle of a weekday afternoon, while you’re sitting on the floor alone trying to figure out which A/V wire goes where into the back of a shitty TV.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Unbreakable
0:49: When I saw the thing above about how a single comic book could cost up to $140,000, my THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY BE TRUE antennae instantly went up. Then I started researching, and holy shit. Turns out, $140,000 is a goddamn bargain for a top-end comic. Just this past year, a highly-graded issue of Superman #1 (the 1939 comic book that introduced the most iconic superhero of all-time) sold at auction for $9.12 million(!!!!!). That’s wild as hell. Anyway, I just wanted to let y’all know that this is the last week of GOOD MOVIE’s existence. I’m shutting it down so I can devote all my time to collecting issues of The Incredible Hulk or whatever. Time for me to buy a fucking boat.
2:49: Oh, man. Here we go. The six most important things from the opening scene I mentioned in the introduction:
This is my favorite opening scene of any M. Night Shyamalan movie ever, and the clip I’d pick first if I had to show someone why I like Shyamalan movies so much. It’s all of his tricks—the moodiness of the moment; the way the camera always feels alive; the manifestation of tension; the big reveal—all at once.
I don’t know if M. Night Shyamalan purposely started a movie called Unbreakable by filming its first scene as a two-minute long unbroken shot, but I wouldn’t put that level of intention past him.
The first three times in Unbreakable that we see Elijah (Sam Jackson’s character in the movie, and the baby in this scene), it’s done so via a reflection in a glass surface of some sort. (Here, it’s in the reflection of the dressing room mirror.) (I’ll point out the other two when we get there.)
The doctor in the scene is played by Eamonn Walker. I bought A LOT of Walker stock in the late ‘90s during his brilliant turn as a Muslim prisoner in the HBO prison series Oz. He has a wonderful voice and an incredible presence on screen. He feels like someone who’s always in control, and like he always has an answer. And to that point…
The way he transitions from THIS IS A JOYFUL MOMENT to THIS IS A HORRIFYING SITUATION when he realizes that the baby’s arms and legs are broken… and the way his voice breaks when he tells everyone what’s wrong with the baby… and the hurt all over his face… fucking hell, man.
The fact that M. Night Shyamalan can turn something as mundane as a conversation in a department store fitting room into something as spiritually violent as, say, the opening shark attack from Jaws is why my money will always make its way into Shyamalan’s pockets anytime he has a movie come out. I’m extremely high on Shyamalan.
4:03: Bruce Willis is here. He plays David Dunn, a low-level security guard who is every bit as weary as his expression here would suggest. I like Bruce Willis’s beaten-up-by-life performance in Unbreakable as a standalone thing, but I love it when measured against the rest of his filmography. It’s just a really wonderful subversion of the preternatural charm audiences expect from him.
4:04: P.S. This train David’s on is about to go flying off the rails and then get hit by another train traveling in the opposite direction. You know what’s a true thing about me? I’ve never been on a train. Not one single time in my life. I’ve always wanted to ride one, but just have never gotten the chance. I’d love to do one of those long-distance trips where you have a sleeping car and all that. I think that’d be so much fun. It’d also be great if I could solve a murder or something while I’m on the train, but that would just be a bonus. Mainly, I just wanna ride one.
9:19: This is Joseph. He’s David’s son. A fun little trick Shyamalan does in Unbreakable is every so often he’ll show something upside down, and that visual will always be attached to something bad happening. Right here, for example, Joseph is upside down on the couch, flipping through TV channels, when he comes across a news story about the train crash.
10:30: The crash killed everybody except for David. And that’s obviously an incredible thing (and the underpinning of the entire movie). But mainly what I wanna mention here is that the doctor in this scene is played by Michael Kelly, and I fucking LOVE Michael Kelly. He’s most famous for his role as White House Chief of Staff Doug Stamper in Netflix’s House of Cards, but he’s also got a handful of really great movies in his filmography (Man on the Moon! Unbreakable! Dawn of the Dead! Invincible! Law Abiding Citizen! Chronicle! Now You See Me!).
14:26: You know what’s never, ever happened? Nobody watching anything featuring Robin Wright has ever said, “Aw, man. Robin Wright is here. What a bummer.” It’s always, “Hooray! Robin Wright is in this!” (The Princess Bride! Forrest Gump! The Last Castle! Moneyball!). Here she plays Audrey, David’s wife in a marriage that’s on the outs. She’s not given a ton to do in this particular role, but she absolutely crushes the one scene where she does get to show off a little. We’re gonna watch it together later.
18:02: Three things to mention here as David stands in a tunnel at work and watches a college football team practice:
M. Night Shyamalan purposely shot a bunch of Unbreakable with the same sort of framing and shadows and perspective that you’d find in the pages of a comic book. It’s often very hard to meld two different mediums, but Shyamalan does it perfectly in Unbreakable. It feels completely natural to the world.
David works as a security guard at a college football stadium. It’s a job he took after giving up his career as a football star to pursue a relationship with Audrey instead (more on this later). Larami and I have a very similar story. The only reason I never played in the NBA is because I wanted to focus on pursuing a relationship with her after meeting her in college. That’s the ONLY reason.
Here’s my one nitpick in the movie: As David watches the team practice, we hear thunder hit a few different times off in the distance. If this had been real, the team would’ve had to immediately cancel practice. It’s a rule I learned back when I was coaching middle school football: Every level of the sport—from little kid peewee football all the way up to the NFL—requires that outdoor practice and/or games be postponed or cancelled as soon as there’s thunder.
22:37: Remember the thing I mentioned earlier about how Shyamalan consistently makes use of reflections when depicting Elijah? Here he is doing it again, this time during a flashback to a pivotal moment in Elijah’s childhood. This entire conversation—during which Elijah tells his mother that the kids at school call him “Mr. Glass” because of how easily his bones break, and she tells him he cannot allow his fear of getting hurt to dictate the way he lives—is shot via the reflection in this TV.
24:52: And remember the thing I mentioned earlier about how Shyamalan likes to show stuff upside down and then attach that upside down-ness to something bad? He does it again here when Young Elijah opens a gift from his mother. (It’s a comic book.) (Young Elijah becoming obsessed with comic books will eventually lead to the deaths of hundreds of people.) (That’s why I never give my kids presents.) (I don’t want them to turn into comic book villains.) (That’s the ONLY reason.)
24:53: P.S. The first time I watched Unbreakable, I did not have any kids. That being the case, it was impossible for me to truly understand the sort of stress Elijah’s mother must’ve been under as she attempted to care for a child with a very rare (and very cataclysmic) bone disease. She’s who I felt the most sympathy for during this most recent rewatch. Seeing your kids in any sort of pain is the fucking worst. Nobody tells you about that part ahead of time. Before you have kids, all anyone talks about is how cute babies or whatever. When really they should be like, “Hey, so, just a heads up, every time something even one percent bad happens to your kid, it’s gonna feel like someone is pouring acid on your heart.”
26:00: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand we’re back to the present. Here’s our first look at Adult Elijah. And, surprise-surprise, it’s a combination of the upside down thing (this is the original drawing for the cover of the first comic book Young Elijah ever received) and the reflection thing. My boy M. Nighty Shy-Shy directed the fuck out of this movie.
