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The Happening   D+
20th Century Fox / UTV Motion Pictures  
http://www.flipsidemovies.com/happening.html
Year Released: 2008 
MPAA Rating: R 
Director: M. Night Shyamalan 
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan 
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley,
Frank Collison, Ashlyn Sanchez, Spencer Breslin, Robert Bailey Jr. 
Review by Rob Vaux  
Here's the problem in a nutshell: M. Night Shyamalan moves heaven and
earth to create the scariest corridor in the spookiest haunted house
in the world. Shadows throw strange and disturbing shapes on the wall,
while the creak of every floorboard sends unseen things scuttling
across the corners of our vision. We're drawn through the terrifying
atmosphere by an irresistible fascination, for at the end of the
corridor stands a door, and on the other side lies The Scariest Thing
We Will Ever See. What is it? We have to open the door to find out. We
inch forward with trembling hands, edging slowly closer. No matter how
frightening it may be, it contains the answers to all the nightmares
around us: the chilling knowledge that explains why our hearts are
pounding so loudly, why our pulses have quickened so unbearably, and
why our guts have clenched into such squirming knots. Through sheer
force of will, we latch our hands on the doorknob, steeling ourselves
for the inevitable gaze into the Gorgon's face beyond. Then with a
shriek of hellish intensity, we wrench it open, revealing at last the
manifestation of our deepest fears... 
...and it's Big Bird. 
But that's not the joke. The joke is that is even as we stand there
yelling, "What the fuck?! It's Big Bird!" Shyamalan can't understand
for the life of him why we're not scared anymore. 
So it is with The Happening, another case of elegant filmmaking
kneecapped by a thunderingly stupid concept. Like much of his work, it
starts with a great hook designed to draw us further into a thoroughly
intriguing mystery. To it, he adds a mood of surreal paranoia, aided
by some fine work by DP Tak Fujimoto and an eye for detail second to
none. In Central Park one morning, masses of people suddenly freeze in
place before calmly finding ways to off themselves. The cause is
unknown: it's like a switch has been turned in everyone's head. The
placid, disinterested looks on their faces as they go about their
final grisly task is enough to send chills down the most stoic spines,
evoking the best elements of horror classics like Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. 
Shyamalan's impressive visual skills transform the basic idea into an
array of stunning vignettes: construction workers tumbling en masse
off the roof of a skyscraper, the hanged bodies of groundskeepers
dangling like fruit from the trees they were just tending, and the
ominous progress of a policeman's service pistol as it travels from
one single-shot user to the next. Moments such as these suggest a
master filmmaker at the peak of his ability, for not only do they
linger hauntingly in the mind, but they create in us a burning desire
to know what on earth could cause such behavior. 
And that's where the trouble starts. For as eagerly as Shyamalan
establishes his Great Whatsit, he hasn't thought through any of the
logical particulars designed to get us the answers. The drama soon
focuses on Philadelphia school teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg)
and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel). Their marriage is having
difficulties -- unveiled by Shyamalan's script in the most banal and
perfunctory ways -- but that's not important. When school is dismissed
following the strange "attack" in New York, they decide to flee the
city before things get any worse. What follows is a briskly paced
odyssey across the Pennsylvania countryside, as the Moores and their
companions find themselves periodically menaced by the "happening" and
struggling to figure out the cause before it does them in. Serious,
serious plot holes crop up almost immediately. If the danger worked
the way it really should, everyone would be dead and we'd have no
movie. So The Happening hashes out some basic rules for survival which
feel arbitrary and random, arrived at intuitively and ignoring a lot
of inconvenient questions that would derail the whole shebang if we
contemplated them too long. Shyamalan inserts occasional encounters
with housebound lunatics in order to spice things up, as well as crude
bits of poorly timed humor which undermine the very tension he's
trying to create. Each of them causes further damage to both the
narrative and our willingness to invest in its outcome, until neither
of them can survive intact. 
Then there's the big twist: the force behind all those mass suicides
and the invisible enemy chasing the Moores so relentlessly. Publicity
for The Happening trumpets the fact that it's not a real twist -- the
answer comes early, with further details arriving in sputtering bursts
thereafter. But that doesn't matter. For all intents and purposes,
it's Big Bird: dumber than a box of rocks and bolstered by a few bits
of dodgy science which still can't excuse the fact that -- no matter
how eerily it's presented-- it's still not scary. At all. In fact, by
investing it with so much pretentious gravitas beforehand, The
Happening transforms its inherent silliness into a sad and infuriating
joke. Any lingering good will towards the film's better elements
(including a nice turn by John Leguizamo as Elliot's best friend) is
retroactively dispelled, twisting its assets into a carnival hustle
that rooks us of our money before leading us unceremoniously to the
Grand Egress. You can use a lot of words for such tactics, but "good
filmmaking" isn't one of them. Unfortunately, it's all Shyamalan seems
capable of these days, though he clearly doesn't realize it and
perhaps never will. To its credit, The Happening improves upon his
execrable Lady in the Water, but only just, and then only long enough
to remind us how utterly lost this once promising auteur has become. 
Review published 06.14.2008. 
 

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