M. Night Shyamalan’s Split is finally out on Blu-ray, which means that audiences will now be able to analyze every frame of this disturbing little thriller and figure out how the director of The Sixth Sense managed to freak us out all over again. But films like Split don’t happen by accident and they don’t spring fully formed out of a filmmaker’s mind. There’s a lot of trial and error involved, and watching the film’s deleted scenes and “alternate ending” can go a long way towards understanding what makes this film so unexpectedly effective.
Here are the five things we learned from watching the film’s deleted scenes. Although none of them revolve directly around THAT moment (and if you’ve seen the film, you know which one I mean) it is definitely necessary to throw up a big ol’ SPOILER WARNING, just in case.
Fans of the movie Split who were tantalized by the possibility of an alternate ending might be a little disappointed. It’s not like there’s a version of the film in which Casey goes feral at the end, or where you-know-who actually shows up and starts kicking The Horde’s butt all over the zoo. Instead, there’s just one sinister shot that M. Night Shyamalan says - in an introduction recorded for the DVD/Blu-ray - he just couldn’t find a place for.
It’s a creepy image, frankly. The Horde perches on a rooftop, looking over a school, muttering to themselves. “Look at all those unbroken souls,” Dennis says. “Such a waste,” adds Patricia. But the scene doesn’t give audiences anything particularly new. The ongoing threat of The Horde was already implied. It’s easy to see why this bit was cut from the movie. It would have diverted the audience’s attention away from the film’s big, big reveal… without revealing anything new on its own.
It’s not uncommon for actors to get cut out of motion pictures, but usually it’s because they only had a relatively small part. That’s not the case here. Split originally co-starred Sterling K. Brown, who just won an Emmy for playing Christopher Darden in American Crime Story. He was in the movie for four lengthy scenes but everyone single one of them was chopped out.
This is another case, however, in which the reasons aren’t as exciting or as dramatic as you might think. In these deleted scenes Sterling K. Brown plays Shaw, the next door neighbor of Dr. Fletcher, whom the psychiatrist routinely visits in order to discuss her theories and flirt.
Unfortunately, Sterling K. Brown’s character serves no other functions in the film. Dr. Fletcher’s loneliness is just as effectively illustrated by giving her no friends at all, and she has plenty of other opportunities to articulate the film’s big ideas about the human brain and it’s power over an individual's physiology. Shaw provides no insights about the film’s main characters, nor does he have any tangible impact on the kidnapping that drives the storyline.
These scenes are a nice addition to the Blu-ray, and they give the great Betty Buckley an opportunity to stretch her muscles a bit in a quasi-romantic storyline, but they add little to the film. If anything, it’s impressive how easily they were removed from Split without anyone noticing. These scenes should serve as a valuable lesson to other filmmakers: if a scene doesn’t need to be in the screenplay, it’ll probably just end up on the cutting room floor anyway.
Let’s go back into spoiler territory. Casey, the kidnapped teenager, has a horrifying backstory. We discover throughout the course of the film that she has an uncle who used to sexually abuse her while they were on hunting trips with her father. Eventually her father dies, unaware that of this nightmare scenario, and her uncle becomes her guardian, perpetuating a traumatic cycle of events.
What the theatrical version of Split cut out, however, was a scene in which Casey confronts her father and, without telling him the whole truth, says she doesn’t want to go hunting with her uncle anymore. Her father agrees. It seems, for a moment, like the horror will end… until Shyamalan cuts to a teenaged Casey, screaming in silence.
This moment seems pretty important until you think about the sheer momentum a film like Split needs to sustain itself. Every plot and subplot in the movie needs to keep moving towards the disturbing conclusion, and this sort of fake out - telling the audience that everything might turn out okay for her, when of course it does not - has all the impact of a speed bump. Split needs to keep revving up the horror, not try to trick the audience into thinking the horror might end.
The plot of Split revolves around a man with multiple personalities, and what happens when some of those personalities develop their own cult-like belief in another, undiscovered, godlike personality. The girls they kidnap are meant to be sacrificed to this beast. And although everyone in the audience probably thinks that’s not a mentally healthy belief system, it sure does seem like Patricia and Dennis, in particular, buy into it.
But in one, short deleted scene on the Blu-ray, Dennis says four simple words that articulate that even he has doubts. “Maybe we ARE crazy,” he confides to Casey, adding to the tragedy of his character.
Then again, as we discover later in the film… maybe there aren’t crazy after all.
The deleted scenes and “alternate ending” on the Blu-ray for Split are - aside from Sterling K. Brown’s character - mostly short moments that were removed for pacing reasons. The film is 117 minutes long, the deleted scenes amount to a small fraction of that, but the original cut -- as M. Night Shyamalan explains in one of his introductions -- was three hours long.
That being said, don’t get excited. Most films start out with an extremely long “work print” that consists of most (if not all) of the footage actually shot for the movie. These work prints are then cut down to a manageable length by removing extraneous moments that contribute little to the film. This doesn’t mean that Split has a three-hour “director’s cut” out there somewhere, or that any of these scenes would have dramatically altered the plot of the movie.
But it does mean that there was probably more material that could have padded out these deleted scenes. These are the highlights from the Split Blu-ray release but there are plenty of other deleted scenes that don’t really expand our knowledge of the movie. There’s a longer clip of Casey and Hedwig on their “play date,” and a scene where Casey talks about animal feeding procedures with Patricia. It’s fun to see those moments if you’re a fan of the movie but they’re hardly enriching additions to the special features. A film as intriguing and unexpected as Split deserved more content than we have on this disc.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire