There are certain cultural touchstones of Philadelphia just like there are cultural touchstones to an M. Night Shyamalan movie. The city has its skyline, its accent, the Rocky steps. The filmmaker has his outrageous premises and horror twists. Wide Awake, Shyamalan’s second, pre-Sixth Sense movie, has almost none of the touchstones you’d recognize from either institution. It’s a suburban coming-of-age comedy about faith and family, featuring a kid named Joshua (Joseph Cross) who goes to a Catholic school called Waldron Academy. The connection, though, is that Shyamalan attended the same school. So did I.
You’ve got to be careful saying you’re “from Philly” if you didn’t technically grow up within city limits, but Joshua is proud to claim the title in Wide Awake, so I will too. Like Josh, I was raised on the Main Line and taught by nuns who loved the Phillies. Back when Josh and Shyamalan attended, Waldron was an all-boys school, but by the time I got there, it had integrated to be co-ed. (Our other most famous alumni is It’s Always Sunny’s Rob McElhenney.) Every half-day or holiday when there wasn’t much of a lesson plan, a teacher would wheel out the TV with the built-in VCR (we were the last generation to use them) and put on Wide Awake as a novelty: Hollywood came here once! There’s our gym! There’s our field! The experiences you’re having as a Catholic school kid are worthy of a major motion picture!
As a result, Waldron students of the early 2000s have seen Wide Awake more than probably anyone else on the planet. Elsewhere, the movie was not a success; Harvey Weinstein interfered with the production and release, and critical reception was tepid when it finally hit theaters. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly good one. It’s a boilerplate precocious kid comedy with a solid supporting cast (including Rosie O’Donnell, Robert Loggia, Dana Delany, an underutilized Denis Leary, and a pre-fame Julia Stiles) and a somewhat cheesy script. It doesn’t fit comfortably within Shyamalan’s oeuvre, and it was so completely overshadowed by the sensation of The Sixth Sense and the career that came afterwards that Wide Awake has faded into relative obscurity.
But not for us at Waldron. In retrospect, it’s almost a surprise that our teachers would be so quick to share Wide Awake, because it’s all about a kid who questions and challenges authority figures and the Catholic institution. Joshua isn’t a rebel without a cause; his inquiries are sincere, and his quest to find God comes from a place of hurt. Grappling for the first time with the death of a loved one, his grandfather (Loggia), causes Joshua to look at his everyday life growing up in the Catholic Church and ask, “What does this mean? Why are we doing this? What is this all for?”
These are fundamental, relatable questions. As his religion teacher Sister Terry (O’Donnell) points out, “A lot of people spend their lives in search of what you’re looking for. Only those people usually finish grammar school first.”
Well, maybe people who didn’t spend their formative years in religious education. At the beginning of the school year, Joshua asks Sister Terry if everyone who isn’t baptized is going to hell. I was around the same age when I started to wonder how there could be both a Big Bang and a Book of Genesis. There’s a threshold you cross right around middle school where it starts to feel like the stories you’ve been told your whole life aren’t adding up, and no adult really has answers conclusive enough to satisfy those growing seeds of doubt.
Wide Awake’s strength is allowing Joshua an unusual depth of feeling for a kid. The adults in his life are patient but puzzled by his questioning, despite it being pretty common for someone that age to begin “waking up” to their own feelings and the world around them. Kids these days have Inside Out to validate all their big feelings, but back at Waldron it was Wide Awake that represented the grief I felt from my own uncertainty, the anger and cynicism I started to experience from being not quite a child, but not quite grown up, either. I felt those things in a deep, encompassing way as a white Catholic kid in a mostly white Catholic school—I can only imagine how it felt for Shyamalan as a non-white, non-Catholic kid in the same environment.
There’s clearly a lot of Shyamalan in Joshua. The baptism question was drawn from the filmmaker’s actual memories in class (“I’d be, like, ‘I’m not baptized, so I guess I’ll see you guys later,’” he told TIME in 2000). Growing up Hindu and attending Catholic and later Episcopalian schools apparently inspired in Shyamalan a curiosity for different spiritual practices that is explored in Joshua’s quest to find God. Wide Awake is nothing like Shyamalan’s other films, except in the ways that it is like Shyamalan himself. It’s not a genre film, there are no jump scares, there’s no grand conflict of good vs. evil. But there is a throughline about faith and higher power, of seeking answers and trying to explain the unexplainable. The line from Sister Terry resonates: “A lot of people spend their lives in search of what you’re looking for.”
And yet Wide Awake does have an incredibly Shyamalan twist, one that somewhat cheapens Joshua’s quest. Real life is always more ambiguous than fiction, and faith isn’t something that can so easily be resolved or quantified. But Shyamalan is a filmmaker who wants to provide concrete answers, even at the risk of ridiculousness. In Wide Awake, he gives Joshua the gift of knowing, definitively, that his grandfather is at peace somewhere, because that’s the answer we all want to hear. In this way, Wide Awake helps unlock some of the choices running throughout Shyamalan’s filmography. Shyamalan was Joshua once. I was Joshua too. When I was at that school, when I was feeling those things, I also would have liked the comfort of definitive answers. Shyamalan offering his own answers, in the form of a film about our shared school experience and made for our school-age selves, is a little comfort of its own.