Unbreakable

Most writers set up a series of reveals that build steadily. M. Night Shyamalan sets up his structure to play one monster reveal. This reveal isn't just the biggest reveal in the story so far. It is information that is so powerful it changes everything that has come before. It is like an earthquake underneath the world the audience shares with the hero.

Most writers do not use this technique because you have to come up with a second alternative for how the events of the world work and what they mean. You have to be able to come up with a detailed reality with the same apparent events as the first alternative, but whose cause-and-effect connection is totally different.

Most writers have tremendous difficulty coming up with one cause-and-effect line. But in Sixth Sense Shyamalan showed that if you can come up with two, you can blow the audience away.

You Can Count on Me

Kenneth Lonergan's film shows us the difference between drama and melodrama. Because we see true drama so rarely it is a surprise when it comes along. What is called drama in Hollywood is almost always melodrama. Melodrama is about going big: the shocking reveal, resorting to the gun, the character who goes mad. It's exciting, it's surprising, but it's almost never honest. It is fake drama, and for that reason, the emotion doesn't hit home with the audience.

This film is real drama. Sammy, a woman with an eight-year-old boy and a job at the bank, endures a visit from a fun but unreliable brother. They don't shoot each other, no one goes mad, no one molests the little kid. But there is real conflict and honest emotion. The brother eventually leaves and the sister and her son stay behind in the town. But they are all deeply changed by their time together.

Notice how the writer sets up both brother and sister as likable people with serious flaws. He's a Tom Sawyer, a mischevous fun-lover who's also unreliable. She is a decent stable woman who locks herself into her way of life and falls into relationships with men because she feels sorry for them. No one is evil in this film. Not even the loser father.

The quality of the drama makes the film's one false note stand out even more clearly. Sammy's affair wiyth her boss isn't set up properly to be believable. So it becomes obvious that the writer is using the event to force the plot to go where he wants it to go.

One other lesson: notice how Lonergan often starts scenes late or ends them early. This not only gives the story economy it makes it feel more real.

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton is a storyteller who shows characters trapped within a system. This is advanced storytelling and the most challenging kind of fiction writing you can do. Wharton is a master at showing that the real currency in a close, hierarchical society is status, not money.

But in The House of Mirth, Wharton makes the deadly mistake found in much of advanced fiction: creating a passive character. Lily Bart simply reacts to the attacks of others around her. Wharton compounds the mistake by making her hero foolish. That means that the plot is stripped of almost all turns. The hero is beaten on for the entire story and then falls. But we've known the final destructionwas coming for a long time. About the only element of story interest here is the fact that Lily's ultimate downfall is caused by her own misplaced sense of right.

Terence Davies' adaptation makes the weaknesses of Wharton's story worse. This film defines slow. Wharton doesn't have to be this dull, as The Age of Innocence proved. Here everything is pounded into the ground.

Some important lessons: if you write about characters within a system, make your hero active, even if he or she fails to defeat the larger system. Keep the scenes tight. And remember, this is film, which uses the cut, and that means that the juxtaposition of scenes is more important than what is in any individual scene. The placement of one scene before or after another should create new information.

The Contender

The first lesson of this film is: Make it authentic. If you are going behind the scenes, you better be right. Not here. A Republican wants to try to hold up a vice presidential nomination. No one would care. The President nominates someone who switched from Republican to Democrat. Wouldn't happen. A freshman congressman joins forces with an opposition leader to stop his own President's appointment for VP. Not in a million years. A woman accused of having sex with two men strolls the grounds of the White House with the president while both are smoking cigars. Right. The Republican leader opposes the Senator because she is a woman, and cares nothing about the fact that she is an atheist. Not in my lifetime.

The other lesson is: Make your hero drive the action. This lead character, who is accused of improper sexual behavior, is treated as a punching bag for the entire film. She doesn't do anything but sit there with a stiff upper lip. Basic story stuff, and it's still true.

Billy Elliot

Clearly the British are learning from Hollywood. Billy Elliot is the BBC version of Rocky, with a few elements from Flashdance and How Green Was My Valley thrown in as well. I kept waiting for the kid to open his arms wide and sing, "Gotta dance!"

But if this is formula moviemaking, it's a formula that works. This kid's success makes you feel good, no matter how jaded you are or how much you notice the strings of manipulation.

The formulaic quality of this film may be why the writers back off of two key moments that could have been bigger. One is when Billy first becomes intrigued with ballet. There is very little sense of why he would be so inspired to dance, before he has actually done it. Yes, the movie opens with him bouncing on his bed and working his body to the music. But that's not enough in an environment that is so hostile to dance.

The second moment is the end when Billy goes in for his audition. The Flashdance version has our hero going through an amazing display of acrobatic dance that has the judges and the audience tapping their feet by the end. But this movie pins Billy's success on what he says about dance. His physical display of greatness has happened earlier in the film when he is frustrated from going to an audition and dances all over the city.

This frustration dance is a brilliant scene, and the actor playing the kid is fantastic. This is dance as modern art, where the artist uses everyday things to make his art. Billy uses stairs, walls, and railings to express how he feels. And it is a dance that is both amazingly accomplished but also obviously untrained. This is a very difficult combination to show, and the choreographer and the lead actor both deserve great credit.

Notice they also cheat this moment in the setup. Until then Billy has been a hard-working klutz. Suddenly, when he is deprived of his chance to try out, he dances like a raw Baryshnikov. But the writers probably didn't want to blow the power of the scene by showing the audience earlier that the boy really is good.

This movie is also guilty of flipping the repressive figures of the father and the older brother too quickly. Dad goes from being a nasty, homophobic bully to being a saint who goes back into the coal mines to help his boy learn to dance.

Billy Elliot is mainly worth studying to see how the writers take the genre and both hit all the beats that make it work and twist certain beats to make it seem new.

With a Friend Like Harry

Thrillers have always been one of the more contrived forms, but there are limits. Within the world the story creates, the logic must make basic sense.

This film has such a poor set up that I almost walked out. The hero meets a stranger in a bathroom on a superhighway. The stranger claims to be an old school acquanence, but the hero has no memory of him. Yet he invites the man and his girlfriend to their country house, then to stay overnight. Then he accepts a brand new car from the stranger. This is not just unbelievable, it's stupid, and there's nothing that angers an audience more than a stupid hero.

Throughout the movie there isn't a peep about motive from anyone. None of this bizarre behavior makes any sense.

The only explanation that has any weight is that the stranger is a figment of the hero's imagination. But notice that is a classic cop out. If the hero is crazy then anything is allowed and the story doesn't have to make sense. You just end up with a really pissed off audience that doesn't like to waste two hours watching lies.

Gladiator

Gladiator is high-concept Hollywood at its best. Like Jurassic Park, it starts with the premise of the championship fight. What is more dramatic and fun for an audience than a heavyweight fight? The question is: who will be the fighters? Michael Crichton figured he'd put the two champions of evolution - humans and dinosaurs - in the ring at the same time and see who's best. David Franzoni's idea was to take a great Roman general and warrior and put him in the ring against Rome's best gladiators.

Franzoni then strings together a series of classic Saturday matinee story techniques to make the high concept work. The film begins with a terrific battle scene whose real purpose is to show the audience what a great soldier Maximus is. He fights for the glory of Rome and an old emperor, played by Richard Harris, who reminds us of Camelot.

Having set up the moral and physical greatness of Maximus, Franzoni introduces the main opponent, Commodus, the emperor's son. This is a key technique because it expands and extends the high concept beyond the hero fighting in the ring. It is what takes the story from simply an action film to an epic. Now the future of the entire empire rides on our hero.

Intercut with the opening is an arcadian vision of Maximus' home, where he longs to return when his fighting days are over. That sets up The Outlaw Josey Wales trick where Maximus' wife and child are murdered and his arcadian home destroyed. The mighty man has fallen to the bottom and must begin his climb back to the top where he will gain his revenge against his hated foe, Commodus, the emperor.

This gives us the clean desire line, and Franzoni can then hang on that line all the old matinee tricks. I actually laughed out loud while I was watching this movie as one classic story technique after another was pulled out of the storytellers' war chest out to do its duty. There's the tiny village in the boondocks of the Roman Empire that just happens to have its own mini-colosseum. From Seven Samurai we get the calm Maximus catching a nap before his first gladiator match. Then it's Maximus cutting seven opposing gladiators to pieces in quick succession.

Each new fight is set up to show that Maximus is an even greater warrior than we had thought before. With his fellow gladiators from the boondocks - another borrow from Seven Samurai - Maximus uses his army experience to turn the tables on the hometown gladiators who are supposed to massacre them. Next is Maximus' fight against the undefeated giant gladiator and the tigers.

Intercut with these fight scenes are intrigues surrounding the emperor, his lovely sister, and the senator, played by I Claudius himself, Derek Jacobi, who wants to return Rome to a republic. The important thing to realize is that this material is the super-structure the writer has built to increase the stakes of the fights and to give the audience breathing room before the next bout starts.

This kind of story structure - esentially a tournament - often has a tough time figuring out how to end the story. This film is no exception. The hero's final battle has to be with his main opponent, who is the emperor. But the emperor's not much of a fighter. Maximus, by contrast, has already proven to us that he is the best fighter in Rome. So the writer is reduced to a ridiculous finale where the emperor fights as a gladiator with a mortally-wounded Maximus. But Franzoni gets away with it because he also pulls out the old action technique of the noble death.

In theme and story technique, this film is extremely old-fashioned. Like Last of the Mohicans a few years back, Gladiator uses 1930s storytelling with 2000 film technology. The result is one of the biggest blockbusters of all time.