Village, The

Posted by: Luna on Friday, July 30th, 2004

Starring : Joaquin Phoenix (Lucius Hunt), Bryce Dallas Howare (Ivy Walker), Adrien Brody (Noah Percy), William Hurt (Edward Walker), Sigourney Weaver (Alice Hunt), Brendan Gleeson (August Nocholson)

The setup:
Lucius Hunt is a man who is too simple to understand fear. He portrays the quietness in all of us. He is a main character because we as the audience all aspire to have an ounce of his simplistic ways. He was even too dumb or quiet to know that he actually loved Ivy.

Ivy Walker, is a blind woman who has an infatuation with Lucius. She is charismatic and plays a super strong and capable individual. Her loss of sight is balanced by her abundance in perceptiveness of her environment. She falls in love with Lucius. By far, she is the strongest character in the movie, who exposes all twists and needed knowledge of the plot to the audience. Her main goal is to symbolize trust, hope, and love.

Noah Percy is a mental challenged grown man who has a crush on Ivy. He is well liked by all, because he is treated like a harmless child. He is a scrappy looking character who looks gentle from all angles, but he shows that his condition makes him erratic, and he becomes more explosive and reckless as the movie goes on.

Edward Walker is the town leader. He is seen as the supreme elder of the Village. Of all the elders, he is the most earnest. He set the pace of the movie. The camera follows his actions and leads to his emotions more than any other character. William Hurt was impecible, as he commanded a great presence.

This is an Ultimate Mucker. It reveals a lot. Don’t read this if you want to see it to believe it!

The Village started out with a foreshadowing of death, as they first showed town members gather over a grave in the twon cemetary. At this point, they let us get a glimpse of the time frame of 1897 or so.

It definitely looks like they are amish, or shaker or at least very early settlers of the great lands in the praries of the United States.

All their clothes, their way of speaking, their reverend acts, and their houses all look as though they were from an age that was long ago.

To cut to the chase, there are the Elders and there are the Young Ones. The Elders are those who know a secret about the Village, while the Young Ones don’t. The Elders have been keeping this secret for 20 or 30 years already.

One things that The Village is surrounded by these monsters, which are viciously fanged, and will pounce and threaten villagers who either enter the wooded territory or see the site of red objects in the village. A lot of the movie was spent to show these monsters up close, and prowl in the village to terrorize everyone. It enforced the rule for all people to never tresspass beyond the village’s borders.

While that is going on, there is a love story brewing between Lucius and Ivy. The movie needed this to happen in order to lead to the twist.

Noah, the mentally challenged grown-up, gets jealous of Lucious because he was courting Ivy, and stabs him with a knife. He hides after realizing that he would be in trouble, but gets caught and locked up in a little shack.

That’s where the foreshadowing of death (from the beginning of the movie) becomes useful. It led us to this point, where we know that the climax (or the unraveling of the mystery, starts here).

Lucius’ stab wound is severe, and there is no medicine in the village to save him. Ivy, out of love and devotion (and desparation to cling on to love), demands permission from her father (Edward), to seek help outside of the village.

Edward is now faced with a big dilemma - to let her blind daughter go into the woods to find medicine for Lucius, or to deny her from going and thereby letting Lucius die from infection.

He decides to let her go into the woods to seek help, but before he does he reveals the big secret to her. They go up to a shed, which is all ratty and old and never been opened by any Young One. Inside it is a costume of the monster! Yes you guessed it, the Elders have conjured up this monster to prevent Young Ones from entering into the woods.

Why don’t the elders want the young ones to enter into the woods you ask? I’ll tell you in a bit.

So Ivy finds out about that secret, and prepares to go on her quest to seek medicines to save her love. She is given a special note by the village doctor (also an elder), which details the exact medicine he needs to cure Lucius.

Ivy is around 20 years old or so, and has grown up thinking that the monsters are real. But although she now knows it’s all fake now, she has to grapple with her wits to determine what’s true and what’s not. It’s super hard for her because afterall… all of her trust was in the hands of the elders, and to know they all lied to her, what is the real truth?

She wanders off into the woods to seek help. She encounters many scary parts of the woods, and it’s instilled by how quiet the whole scene was. Man, I was scared for her!

Then all of a sudden, the monster came around the corner. Ivy couldn’t believe it, afterall she was told explicitly that it was all made up. Who is she to believe now? She was crying and super scared.

She bucked up and tricked the monster to falling into a deep whole where it laid still and died. A close up camera revealed to the audience that it was in fact Noah.

Ivy continues her trek, and reaches a wall which she climbs up and over. A siren startles her, and then it became clear of the twist!

A siren! from a truck! A forest ranger comes out in a modern day paved road. The whole setting was in present day! That’s the twist!

She receives help from the ranger, who does not reveal to her anything about this timeframe, and give her the medicine.

She rushes home and passes on the medicine in time to save Lucius.

That’s the end.

Observations and parallels:

This was an okay movie, although there were many things that were “too conveniently” laid out to create the whole facade.

One major point was a parallelism between modern day society and old society. Although the complexity levels are drastically different, the movie centered on the fact that all stages of society have unsurmountable problems. Modern age has societal problems of money, fear of trusting, and killing/corruption, while old society still faced similar problems. The abstraction was just on different levels.

Isolation was a commonality too. The elders decided to move away from the faced paced city life to try out building a small settlement (the village) so that they could control their surroundings and have a bigger say as to what goes on. Ironically the isolation of the village, and the inability to reveal to all of the real world traps them, and so their facade has to be kept secret for decades, which consumes them even more.

Lastly, the irony of wanting to be away from modern day society because of fear of external variables was very apparent, as they revealed that the monster was a made up. Is conjuring up a fearful monster to scare all Young Ones not the same societal problems they were facing when living in the city?

**This spoiler and review sent in by Gastown Grouch. Thanks!

Want to know more?
Read more about this film at The Internet Movie Database.