"One thing you can't fight is the absence of something, like suspense or the third act revelation that generates an intake of breath, such as the one in 'Sixth Sense.' Such vision for the mind-bending moment doesn't blow in on the breeze--and the conceptual genius it requires makes no appearance here." -Jules Brenner, Film Critic
A common criticism of the film. Fair? Of course not: Shyamalan gets ridiculed for the predictability of his trademark "twist", and is then scorned when he offers up a work lacking it. I pity the man because, for all of his faults in screenwriting, I feel he is this generation's next closest thing to Hitchcock. He is in that kind of catch-22 in which conformity to past efforts yields "opportunistic, contrived!" and divergence is deemed as "losing his edge!" Indeed, when one is parodied on South Park, being compared to Michael Bay for his inability to develop a plot, rest assured that he is taking a dive in the public's affections.
But unlike his last two efforts, The Village and Lady in the Water, The Happening does not dive. It plays off of the same existential fear of the unknown Other as Hitchcock's The Birds, weaving an apocalyptic tale of inability and attempted escape: it's a calm, beautiful day in New York City until gradually increasing numbers of people begin to behave abnormally. Some begin to walk backward, others have blank stares on their faces. The conclusion is the same: a reversal of the self-preservation instict and eventual gruesome suicide. Beautiful shots here, the best being a lower-leg shot scene that involves a policeman shooting himself, a citizen in the background slowly walking to pick up the gun, shooting himself, and so on. We see the legs, we see the gun drop. That's it. The movie follows the attempts of a science teacher named Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) to comprehend and escape what is happening around them.
Yes, there is no twist. And no, this is not a film crafted to capitalize on the eco-friendly craze. If you are a green hippie who left the theatre with warm fuzzies for Shyamalan's condemnation of global warming, think again. More specifically, think back to the beginning scene of Elliot teaching his class that not all phenomena are explainable... They just happen. Tree-hugging apologies for what occurs are juxtaposed with paranoid neoconservative ones that attribute it to terrorism. Both are merely hubris.
And that is what really frightens us after all: the unknown, the unexplainable. It is what makes these characters' plights so interesting, their being forced- in an age of technology and mass media that aim at knowing and explaining, all the while tending to alienate- to rely upon complete strangers for survival. Walls are broken down as technology, even military, are rendered impotent. We see how frightening life can be without these comforts when characters move from the urban to the rural, from the pleasantries of Central Park to the horror of a seemingly abandoned house that is occupied with paranoid loons who blow off a young teen's head; or a faith-crazed old lady who has room for crosses and wooden dolls, but not those in need. Indeed, fear of the Other persists throughout this film.
Rogert Ebert had an interesting take on Night's work previous to this one, Lady in the Water, that I find particularly insightful. Regarding that film, Ebert points out Shyamalan's overt transference of private emotions into the public medium, the film/book critic acting as a manifestation of Night's disappointment with his many critics. With The Happening, we see this tendency coming full circle, for if there is one characteristic of this film that distinguishes it from his others, it is the lack of any teleology, or purpose. In previous films, whether it was a character's own devices or those of the supernatural, we knew by film's end that there was the presence of some designer all along- making sure that things went as they should (recall Mel Gibson's famous line, "Do you believe in coincidences?" in Signs). Not so in this film, which makes me think that either the critics have finally (and unconsciously) gotten to Night, or that The Happening represents the director's conscious attempt to give the critics what they have seemingly wanted all along. For in dropping his "contrived" plot structures and giving them the inverse, he validates his art. False dichotomy, you say?
There's only one problem: as an individual film, viewed outside the Shyamalan canon, The Happening does work- for the same reason The Birds works. Why are the birds attacking? Does Jessica Tandy's character survive and civilization survive? We are never told. We are just given the experience, comic relief in the form of a drunken man's religious declaration that it is the "end of the world" or a science-loving woman's refusal to acknowledge that which does not follow the natural order, and some bad acting on the part of Tandy along the way. The Happening functions much the same way: something happens, people attempt to cope with it according to their own presuppositions (e.g. John Leguizamo's character who finds solace in mathematical probabilities), and there is some sketchy acting here and there. Excuse the latter, and the misplaced and poorly developed romantic subplot, and The Happening is as good a thinking-man's movie as any summer flick of recent years.
B+
