Best Actress in a Supporting Role 1999: Toni Collette in The Sixth Sense

Toni Collette received her only Oscar nomination to date for her performance as Lynn Searse in The Sixth Sense.

The Sixth Sense is a rather effective thriller about a psychologist's attempts to help a child who communicates with dead people. While I don't think it is the masterpiece some people think it is, I still find it an extremely compelling and thrilling experience thanks to M. Night Shyamalan's pitch-perfect direction and a terrific script. In the leading role Bruce Willis does a solid, memorable job.

Toni Collette, who is in my opinion a wonderful actress, plays the role of the mother of Cole, the child who "sees dead people". Lynn is the kind of role that the Academy loves to reward: the worried, protective but loving and supportive mother. It's the kind of role that has been seen and portrayed million of times, a kind of role that offers an actress some emotional, teary-eyed scenes but is at the same time surprisingly thankless as it rarely gives the role much of a backstory and a vivid personality - it's the kind of character that only exists to support other characters while not truly having a complete life of its own. Unfortunately this is case for Lynn Searse too: who is she? Aside from her relationship with her son, we don't know a lot about her. But even if the role itself may be extremely limited, there is no way to deny that Toni Collette does some moving and powerful work in her performance and she adds a lot to the movie even thought her performance still feels too limited to truly shine. Of course, the most important aspect of her performance is Lynn's relationship with Cole and Toni Collette is fantastic in portraying the complicated emotions that Lynn feels towards her son: she shows perfectly that Lynn doesn't quite know what to do with him, she doesn't know if he's deliberately lying or if he's just imagining things but she never makes Lynn's love for her son is never in question - Collette properly portrays the fear and worries of her character but she always adds a lot of warmth and tenderness in her scenes with Osment and she also does a really good job in showing her sorrow in seeing that her son doesn't have any friends and is often bullied by his classmates. Her chemistry with Osment is also absolutely top-notch as they support beautifully each other and work together in perfect armony. In their ordinary scenes, when the ghosts aren't mentioned and they only seem a bad dream, they manage to create some poignant, warm and memorable moments; and in the scenes in which Cole mentions the ghosts, Collette is very moving in showing her attempts to communicate with her son as she doesn't want him to feel different from other boys (or, as he puts it, a "freak") while still portraying the frustration that comes from her inability to understand him. Collette herself also has a few strong moments even outside her scenes with Osment, particularly she's very good in portraying the shock, disbelief and anger of Lynn in the scene in which a doctor questions her ability as a mother and asks her if she has ever abused her son. Collette portrays Lynn as probably the most realistic character of the movie - she is a hard-working single mother who struggles to balance things out between her son and her job - and thanks to her realism she grounds the movie which, without her, could have been much less affecting as she manages to connect the reality with the supernatural elements.

But, as I said before, while she adds a lot to the movie, her performance never becomes truly great as the role still feels thin and it feels as if her performance improves everything around her while still remaining somewhat limited. But this is absolutely not Toni Collette's fault as she makes the most out of the role and in her almost iconic big scene she's indeed groundbreaking: as Cole tells Lynn that he talked to his dead grandmother and that she told him that she saw Lynn's dance performance when she was little (while Lynn herself thought she didn't come to see her) and that she is proud of her everyday, Toni Collette does some phenomenal, heartbreaking facial acting and the way she slowly breakdowns is the stuff Oscars are made of. With that single scene, she adds a depth, a complexity and a history to a character that doesn't have any.

In the end, this is an extremely hard performance for me to rate: she has one truly incredible scene but the rest of her performance doesn't quite live up to the hype. Her performance is in some ways essential to the movie but at the same time the limitations of the role prevent her from going too far with it. It's a very good, occasionally great, performance but unfortunately I don't find myself sharing the intense love that this performance receives.

3.5/5

While she was originally a 4, I decided to downgrade her performance a little bit. I still think it's a good performance and my thoughts on her haven't changed all that much, I just think I was being a bit too generous with my rating previously.