I must confess. I doubted Night Shyamalan. I never will again. I assumed, while watching Wide Awake, that Shyamalan’s great film work began with The Sixth Sense. I assumed that Wide Awake was just a trial attempt at film writing. I was wrong. Wide Awake stands right up there with Shyamalan’s works.

I was led to believe so, originally, because the story seems fairly simple throughout the larger part of the film. The story centers around Joshua A. Beal (Timothy Cross), as he likes to introduce himself, a fifth grader at a Catholic school who is “on a mission” to find God after the death of his grandfather (Robbert Logia). The scenes pass as Joshua makes various attempts at trying to find God but seems to fail at every attempt. In the mean time we see Joshua growing up with a traditional youth characters such as his parents (Dana Delany and Denis Leary), an older sister (Julia Stiles), a crazy best friend (Timothy Reifsnyder), a bully (Michael Pacienza), and a girl (Heather Casler) while attending a Catholic school with all of its idiosyncrasies such as a lackadaisical priest (Dan Lauria) and a nun who’s obsessed with sports (Rosie O’Donnell).

The performances are good, especially on the part of Timothy Cross, who performs a wide range of emotions fairly well. Wide Awake is competently filmed and frequently includes mild humor. But the story appears to be rather simplistic and not really going anywhere as Joshua tries to figure out where God is hiding.

It would have been very easy, and would have made a nice enough ending, for Shyamalan to simply conclude the whole of the investigation with the scene we see at the very end of the film. That ending, however, is fairly weak – maybe even cheap – and fortunately is just an afterthought in Wide Awake. The true climax is much more powerful and wholly unexpected. Joshua finds God in his response to the Other.

I never dreamed that anyone other than me and a few others would ever believe in that kind of suggestion – much less a Hollywood filmmaker. Joshua finds God, on the true fundamental level, not through any evidence or proof, but through the fact that he has become more responsive to other people! He forgives the bully, befriends a loner, and comes to respect his friend. He is now wide awake to the reality of others.

Wide Awake does seem to have its inconsistencies, such as why his parents, who are concerned enough to send him to a Catholic school, are uninterested in helping him in his search for God and even try to distract him away from it. Also, it can be admitted that Joshua is a pretty bright, sensitive fifth grader – but this kid just plain acts and talks like an adult. There’s the occasional mispronunciation of a word to remind us that this is a fifth grader, but I still have a hard time buying it.

Wide Awake, nevertheless, is still a powerful script – one that I’d like to see a lot more of in the future.

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