It happened again: the Shyamalan dud

My patience and tolerance for M. Night Shyamalan’s endless tinkering with his career has finally come to a fizzled, tattered end with a movie that isn’t even half bad. The problem is it’s not half good either. And this guy was supposed to be the next Spielberg, the next Hitchcock.

Admittedly, we leapt on Sixth Sense a bit too hard and we expected too many great things too soon from a young director still trying to align his bearings in the film community he had so impressively wowed. But that leaves no excuse for his heavy-handed, self-important recent films. Pictures like Lady in the Water, which was made with no one but his children in mind, or The Village, which I admired but will admit it smacked of a pompous director gloating at how clever he was.

Extending the auteur theory on the same two-dimensional plane as his previous works, The Happening is very much a Shyamalan film because it deals with far-out scenarios as they happen to real people. His pictures attempt some kind of hyper-real aesthetic: the stories involve aliens, monsters, superheroes and ghosts, but the characters are shown doing things we would probably do in similar situations. Their actions are so authentic that we identify with their simplicity.

In a calm afternoon in Central Park, a woman hears a scream. “That’s odd,” she says as people begin walking in reverse and repeating themselves in confused tones. Then, one by one, everyone begins killing themselves: construction workers leap from buildings, a woman stabs at her jugular with her hair pin and drivers ram carelessly into trees. In one chilling sequence, a cop turns his pistol on himself. After the gun falls from his dead hand a pedestrian picks it up and repeats the suicide. This goes on with other onlookers until the gun clicks empty and the last person, in a catatonic daze, must now finish their suicide by another gruesome means.

So now you know why the film was Rated R, Shyamalan's first such rating. When the construction workers leap from buildings their bodies hit the ground in mists of pink, compound fractures and gaping. Some land on hard edges, or in contorted positions that allow bodies to fold and break in gruesome ways. Later we see a man turn on a riding mower and then lay down in front of it; the mower chugs over the man's torso until it begins spitting out his flesh, a mighty fine mulch I'd imagine. The R rating provides some interesting visuals to the film, but otherwise it's just a barrier keeping teens away from a movie they might find intriguing. For once, I'll argue that a PG-13 rating was the way to go.

Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is a school teacher outside the city. As he puts the finishing touches on a class discussion about where the honeybees have all gone — the answer to the film possibly? — school is let out early due to a terrorist act in Central Park. Of course, we’ve seen Central Park and we know terrorists were not involved. Soon people are packing onto trains to flee “the happening,” but what are they fleeing?

The movie has a terrific sequence that doesn’t attempt to answer the question, but does convey the paranoid terror of not knowing: on a train, as people learn new details (“It’s in Boston too!”) the twitchy paranoia escalates as claustrophobia descends onto those cramped, overcrowded train cars. Eventually the train stops because the conductor can’t get an answer from the next station, or even the next city. Ratcheting up the horror, one woman receives a call from her niece, who almost immediately begins repeating, "Calculus, calculus … calculus." The call ends with a table saw being turned on and then the sound of a wet, bone-splintering thud that we presume is …well, that’s for you to presume.

The film plays with what the happening might be: terrorism is dismissed, chemical warfare seems plausible and then some kind of earth defense mechanism is proposed. Like Shyamalan’s Signs, if you listen carefully the movie answers its own questions, but it throws out a number of red herrings first. For instance, we’re shown a man who owns a nursery. As he packs for the journey ahead he talks to his plants because research has shown, he says, that talking to plants stimulates their growth. As he leaves the greenhouse, we can see the nursery is within a mile of the cooling towers of a nuclear plant. Later nuclear radiation is proposed as the main culprit to the suicides. Are these clues, connections, coincidences? The movie has an answer, but it lets us agonize on our own with the truth.

The Happening is very much a human drama; it’s not so much about the suicide virus but about how people react to it as they are overcome by it. Elliot is on the road with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel, proving that any movie benefits from her presence) and his niece (Ashlyn Sanchez). He instinctively gets off the main roads and into the country, where the trees howl and the wind screams through the tall grass. Then he decides it’s the plants that are turning off the part of our brains that keeps us from harming ourselves. (I would hope there's more than one switch in our brain that keeps us from jabbing dinner forks into our eyes.) Earth is defending itself from us, he figures — a robust global warming allegory perhaps? — and they’re in the middle of exquisite farming country, where the next breeze from an unharvested field could rewire their brains to make them gouge their wrists out or hang themselves from trees.

I enjoyed the suspense and build-up of The Happening, and in many ways I enjoyed Shyamalan’s shameless writing and directing style, which toy with our emotions more than they should be allowed to get away with. I did not enjoy how the film ended, mainly because it didn’t — not only was his trademark twist gone, but so was everything else. A better movie would have not skipped ahead three months to simply reveal Alma’s pregnancy, which is pointless to everyone except Elliot and Alma.

One of the last developments before the time jump is a scene with an older woman at the edge of civilization, who hasn’t heard of the happening because she has no phone or television. Her performance — I’m still trying to figure out if her craziness was intentional or not — was so uneven and messy that it derailed the picture. That did it, but so did Shyamalan, who expects us to buy into his asinine conclusion after the long journey we weathered to get to it. And with no twist ending, I left the theater with nothing to debate about with the other viewers; it was all wrapped up too neat.

The Happening will confuse and bother many moviegoers, but Shyamalan’s shrinking legion of fans will be captivated to a certain degree. If I could give him some advice, though, it would be this: let someone else write your next movie. He’s always been a better director than a writer.

***This review originally ran in the West Valley View June 17, 2008.***