What’s Happening? (The Happening)

Shyamalan’s B-movie

Jun. 20, 2008

midnight

In his novel The Terror, Arthur Machen imagined thatthe animals, sickened by the carnage of World War I, turned on humankind withtooth and claw. Later, Daphne du Maurier in a story adapted by Alfred Hitchcockthought the birds might strike at people for reasons known only to themselves.In The Happening, director-writer M.Night Shyamalan explores the idea that plants, threatened by our poorstewardship of their environment, might launch a holocaust against humanity.

It’s the right message ata moment when much of our world seems to be collapsing, except for water levelsand prices, which are on the rise. Is Shyamalan the wrong messenger? For theirown inane reasons, movie criticsfrom professionals for the dailies to bloggerswearing footed pajamas as they tap away in their rec roomsturned in massagainst Shyamalan several years ago like lemmings catching wind of a nearbycliff. The filmmaker behind The SixthSense fulfilled their worst predictions with Lady inthe Water, one ofthe worst movies ever by a significant director. The Happening is a partial return to form, but it’s a return fromthe abyss to the rim of catastrophe. Little wonder nine out of 10 film criticshave dismissed The Happening withderision. Occasionally, the movie is laughable.

Odd things start happeningin Central Park at the story’s onset.Resembling a lost scene from “Twilight Zone,” the crowd suddenly stops in itstracks, frozen in place. And then the people begin killing themselves, as if anevil demiurge flipped the suicide switch. The media proffers terrorism by anairborne toxin as the explanation, even as the suicides spread in ripplingwaves beyond ground zero. The devastation extends beyond the reach of anyterrorist cell.

Unnerved by the newsreports, the protagonists, citizens of Shyamalan’s beloved Philadelphia, decide to make for theillusionary safety of the countryside. Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma(Zooey Deschanel), accompanied by their friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and hislittle daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), crowd onto the first train out of town.When the engine clanks to a halt and the confused crew abandon their posts, thepassengers are left on their own to go their own way to no one knows where. Oneof Shyamalan’s most effective devices in the early scenes is to show how thecontagion of confusion spreadsthrough the cramped train carriages by cell phones. Before long, the phones godead.

Rather than hold The Happening to the standards of theart house, or Shyamalan’s earlier films, it’s fairer to compare it to theB-grade science-fiction flicks of the 1950s. Like many of those bottom-billed,drive-in movies, The Happening isgrounded in contemporary anxieties and explores those fears through anapocalyptic fantasy. And like most of those movies, The Happening stumbles over many clumsy moments. The man beingeaten by lions at the Philadelphia Zoo, live on someone’s cell phone camera, isbetter imagined than seen. Many minor characters are preposterous stick figuresbarely recognizable as human. While Shyamalan effectively introduced a touch ofcomic relief into Signs, here thehumor is leaden.

With a better cast, The Happening would make a strongerimpression. Lacking a Bruce Willis or a Mel Gibson, Shyamalan makes do with thesort of blandness delivered in the ’50s by the no-namers playing air forcegenerals and government scientists faced with giant tarantulas or space aliens.Wahlberg is mostly competent as the affable high school science teacher butnever transcends the pulpy material with a great performance. Deschanel iseither one of the worst actresses in the business or was saddled with one ofthe most poorly written female roles in recent memory.

And yet I’m not willing to give failing marks to Shyamalan’s seriouslyflawed movie. It has cinematic moments and an interesting story to tell. Thebackdrops are subtly encoded with omens, from the stout smoking funnels of thenuclear power plant filling the horizon in one scene to the realty sign outsidea model McMansion reading: YOU DESERVE THIS. There are effectively creepyscenes, especially when the branches and tall grass begin to shiftthreateningly as if aroused by a wind that’s not a wind. And while Elliot’sscientific method comes in handy, ultimately, the pretense of schoolbookscience is deflated by developments outside the boundary of accepted laws andtheory. The kooky old hippy talking to his plants, one of the daft charactersElliot encounters on the journey is closer than anyone to the truth of The Happening.