Levy and Peeters used the beach in “Sandcastle” as little more than a magical realist device to examine mortality and existence, but Shyamalan takes this premise and runs riot with it. “Old” is a mystery-thriller where people spend a lot of their dwindling time figuring out the science behind how the beach functions, rather than just being a movie about strangers who visit a remote beach who mysteriously start to age one year every half-hour. A side plot concerning a sinister group that worked to unite this particular group of people for a larger good is also included by Shyamalan. The director himself emphasises the point with one of his signature cameos, going even further into meta territory (though with a playful wink) than when he appeared in “Lady in the Water” as a writer who was literally meant to alter the world.
In other words, “old” is a big word. Despite this, the film is just too intensely personal and weird, whether in terms of its plot, tonal swings, or the perplexing locations Shyamalan chooses to set the camera, to be easily dismissed. The way “Old” pays homage to a long-forgotten 1970s western starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson (!) and directed by Arthur Penn (!!) of “Bonnie and Clyde” fame is possibly the best illustration of this.
Remember that movie? Shyamalan’s dad does
“The Missouri Breaks,” which was directed by Arthur Penn and features Jack Nicholson as Tom Logan, was written by Thomas McGuane (“92 in the Shade,” “Tom Horn”). Tom, the head of a band of cattle rustlers, decides to buy a farm next to their ranch and steal horses from it in order to get revenge on a land magnate who murdered a member of his gang. The baron seeks revenge by hiring eccentric shooter-for-hire or “regulator” Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando; yes, that is the character’s name), who promises to kill Tom and his gang.
“The Missouri Breaks” was a box office failure when it was released in 1976, even following Brando and Nicholson’s respective Oscar-winning performances in “The Godfather” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” M. Night Shyamalan acknowledged in an interview with FOX that he hasn’t really watched the film, and it hasn’t yet developed a cult following. Even so, he chose to make a reference to it in “Old” by having Charles (Rufus Sewell), a middle-aged surgeon with schizophrenia, make references to the movie frequently as the beach ages him and causes him to develop dementia quickly.
As the director outlined:
“I’ve never seen [‘The Missouri Breaks’] … It’s from my dad [Dr. Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan], who actually has some dementia, and he would not stop talking about Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, this movie that they were in. And I was like, ‘Dad, I have never seen it.’ And he goes, ‘Jack Nicholson! Marlon Brando!’ And he kept going on and on about it. I was like, ‘Dad, I’m putting this in a movie if you keep talking about this.’ And he did.”
Shyamalan, good or bad? The answer is… yes
If you’re anything like me, my readers, you have mixed feelings regarding the director M. Night Shyamalan. His use of stilted dialogue is obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less awkward to listen to. His audacious use of genre tropes (whether they be sci-fi, fantasy, or horror) to explore themes about the human condition and spirituality is contradicted by his inability to let go of the high of “The Sixth Sense,” which leads to a continued production of films in which the major twists and revelations fall flat. Then there is his formalist visual aesthetic, which can be brilliant or extremely distracting depending on the scene or obfuscate the message Shyamalan is trying to get through.
We could continue, but I think you get the point (such as his continual use of mental illness as a story element). He also pours his own money into creating his works of art, investing a lot of himself in them. You can see that when he talks about his movies, too, as how he interprets “Old’s” reference to “The Missouri Breaks”
“For me it represents this thing that someone’s holding onto for their sanity. Everyone must know, these are the two greatest actors of all time, why doesn’t anybody know this? And so they can’t understand this but they’re holding onto it… It was just a kind of funny, sad, beautiful thing about my dad and cinema.”
Then there’s the way Shymalan chooses not to join an existing series while eschewing projects based on “safe,” well-known IPs in favour of either creating unique, riskier, low-to-mid-budget thrillers or, in the case of “Old,” a movie based on a comparatively unknown source. It’s what draws me back to his work time and time again to the point that I can say that, regardless of how his films come out, there is a part of me that adores them all.
Rest confident that I will be prepared to be injured once more when his next film, “Knock at the Cabin,” comes out.
