Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 6:3	Budget Medium

There used to be a game called "the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon". Basically you started with any actor and through common movies worked your way back to Bacon. For example (and I am cheating here by using IMDB) Ron Canada was in Adventures in Babysitting with Elizabeth Shue who also was in Hollow Man which also starred Kevin Bacon. The man is not quite 50 but has been in 60 movies, so the game gets easier every year.

In Stir of Echoes, Kevin stars with Kathryn Erbe (who reminds me of Genevieve Bujold) as a couple who are living a pretty normal lower middle class existence. As the movie opens we find out that they are having a maybe unexpected child. The child they already have, Jake, seems to have a rather odd imaginary friend. Illeana Douglas (who is younger than Bacon but actually has 68 acting credits to her name) is introduced as a witch, but pretty quickly turns out to be a perpetual college student who dabbles in hypnosis. After we have a chance to get to know the characters and the neighborhood some, Illeana's character mesmerizes Bacon. He has an unsettling vision and later finds out she left a post hypnotic suggestion to "leave his mind open". This is actually one of the little touches that the movie does so well. Illeana's character states that she wanted Bacon to be more "open minded" but she inadvertently leaves his mind an "open door". Suddenly Bacon's character is obsessed with a ghost and can't make himself go to work. He seems to be constantly thirsty. Eventually after literally tearing the house apart, he finds the corpse of the ghost that is haunting him just in time to be nearly killed by the guys that did the killing and hid the body.

I originally saw this movie a couple of years ago and while I enjoyed it, I didn't feel overly satisfied with it. Upon re-watching the movie I found that I still enjoyed the movie, but the things that bothered me the first time really stood out now. First was the use of color. The director bathed some shots in blue or red-orange. At first I thought the blue was indicating dream state but then Bacon has an hallucination in red light. I think (and I may be grasping at straws here) that they reflect the red jacket and blue shirt of the murder victim, though I would have liked a bit better explanation of such a strong visual.

Also Jake has conversations with the victim's ghost on a regular basis including getting a recommendation for a babysitter. Bacon digs up the backyard, rips up the floorboards, takes an air jack to the basement floor before finally finding the body in the wall in the basement. You would think that somewhere along the line the ghost who was haunting Bacon would mention something like "oh by the way, my corpse is in the basement wall". But no, poor Kevin only gets "dig" as his instructions.

But the thing that annoys me the most is how the writer or director (I have not read the original book, so I don't know if this problem is there as well) used psychic ability to gloss over all kinds of things. Okay, so I can take that the premise of the movie is a kid who can see and talk to dead people. I have no real trouble going along with the dad having it too (the movie states that it is an inheritable condition). However, at one point Jake suddenly can communication telepathically with someone he never met. Then at the end of the movie Jake makes two predictions about the future that come true. In fact, Bacon character knows immediately when his wife's grandmother dies. We are talking about four different abilities here, talking to the dead, knowing when someone has died, mental telepathy and precognition. And no, I don't buy into the "there all the same thing" line. Applied force is what drives in a nail, loosens a screw, or cuts a board, but it takes three different tools to apply the force correctly. To suddenly give all these tools to Jake smacks of Deux ex Machina. He does nothing with these additional abilities except to provide plot points. While I liked the scene where Erbe and Jake are playing together on a walk by the cemetery, what happens inside is totally unnecessary. If you want to introduce an underground psychic power group, go through Illeana's character. It was only mildly annoying when he was able to talk telepathically to the cop, but the feathers thing at the end just irritated me. If they had just let him remind the mom that she had forget her purse (which had a knife in it that would become important later), there would be a subtle ambiguity. Was he simply being helpful or did he possibly know something? When they add in the "afraid of the feathers" comment and the shot at the end, the filmmakers are saying definitively that Jake can see the future.

Still the pacing of the movie is pretty good, the acting is uniformly strong and there are a few really nice special effects shots. The Sixth Sense was released just a month before this movie and the similarities were very strong, so Stir of Echoes has always had a sort of copycat air about it. I waiver back and forth on this movie, but in the end I liked the strong relationship between the two leads and felt the supporting characters were fleshed out better than average which made for a enjoyable movie even with the flaws. You just have to look at Jake as the Swiss Army knife kind of psychic.

Addendum: For various reasons I decided to read the book the movie is based on. I don't like it when people say "I liked the book better than the movie". This implies that a book and a movie are much more alike than they are. There is a reason that we use words to communicate with each other and not charades. A book has the option of letting us in on a tremendous number of emotional details that are usually impossible to film. While a film can only paint emotions in a broad sense, it can fill the screen with things. So a writer can say something like "her last insult pushed him over an edge from which he never would recover, but he remained stone faced, not giving any indications of the anger, pain and loneliness he was feeling". Good luck filming that. If it is a pivotal plot point, then there are ways it can be done, but it is time consuming to provide all the visual clues necessary. By the same token, a book cannot detail all of the items in a wizard's cluttered room without sounding like a catalogue but a film can pack the place with eyes of newt, monkey claws, bubbling liquids, etc.

Anyway, the screenplay writer took a few key items out of the book and made a much different storyline. Different enough that my initial mild feeling about the copycat nature of the film has progressed to a near certainty that the story was manipulated to emulate "The Sixth Sense". Besides changing the names of the main characters (first and last names in most cases), the sex of hypnotist, the location, who was killed, who did the killing, and the reason for the killing, the screenwriter also drastically changed the child's role. In the book, the child is only about two years old and can barely speak. He does seem to have inherited the family ability to be a medium, but is a relatively minor character in the book. The book's very unsatisfactory denouement reveals that after having a bullet graze his skull, Tom looses his ability to speak to the dead and everything returns to normal. In the movie, we think that Tom is either in control of this new ability or it left with the ghost but the child's ability seems to be starting to overwhelm him. But the biggest change from the book is the relationship between the husband and wife. The book portrays the two as partners. They are best friends, lovers, and completely trust each other. As soon as the psychic powers start awakening in Tom, he discusses them with Anne (his wife's name in the book). Most of the steps they take to work through the problems are decided together. At one point Anne is truly frightened by her husband's new ability and uses her mother's funeral as a chance to get away. This nearly undoes Tom and Anne quickly returns so that they can face the crisis together. What makes this so unusual is that the book was written in 1958, at a time when the stereotypical couple was "Father Knows Best". I was actually starting to wonder if the date on the book's title page was wrong, when the writer dropped a reference to Barney Oldfield. The movie completely derails this trusting relationship and for much of the movie Tom is hiding his ability from his wife. The fact that he is not discussing this with her is made very evident when she confides in her sister that Tom has taken two weeks off work and done nothing. This makes it feel like the conflict is only Tom's problem and his wife is more of a hindrance than a help. Indeed, when all the pieces drop into place, she is not even present and returns late in the final scenes.

As I have mentioned, I think trying to compare a book to a movie is a questionable thing to do and in this case with so much of the book's storyline changed, it would be ridiculous. I had hoped for some insight into some of the film's elements that confused me, but in the end all that happened was my initial thoughts that the movie's integrity had been compromised were confirmed. Still, the movie is not without merit and is certainly worth watching.

Addendum #2. At this point I am giving the movie much more attention than it deserves, but I finally got around to seeing "The Sixth Sense". There is no doubt that Stir "borrowed" liberally from Sense. Besides the obvious (the kid who sees dead people) there is the color and sound cues that I found confusing on my viewings of the movie. Now I know them to be a poor attempt to match the richness of Shyamalan's picture.

Got a comment or different opinion? Send a message.