Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
6/14/08
***M. NIGHT SHAYAMALAN
DISCLAIMER: It goes without saying that if you want to see The
Happening with no idea what it's about, read no further. But
this isn't really a “twist” movie and your enjoyment shouldn't be lessened
by knowing its' secrets any more than a normal film***
For your consideration:
a career at a crossroads. After his brilliant and hugely successful
three picture run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs,
horror/sci-fi auteur M. Night Shayamalan stood atop the world. Then
came The Village, an intriguing and thought-provoking tale that
suffered from a mid-movie reversal that made everything less interesting
than it had previously seemed. It represented a forgivable one-movie
slump at least until his follow-up, Lady in the Water, was
a disastrously muddled screenplay rendered tolerable by Shayamalan's formidable
directorial skills and a few strong performances. Now, the “genius”
bloom is off the rose. With fans no longer able to take his name
as a guarantee of quality, what's a man who'd become a genre onto himself
to do? Stage a comeback, that's what. The Happening
shows the director playing in a bigger, scarier sandbox than before, balancing
R-rated shocks with an amazingly deft hand for tension-releasing humor.
During its' 91-minute running time, the movie piles on unspeakable, apocalyptic
horrors, but it is first and foremost a roller coaster ride of spooky thrills.
It's not Shayamalan's best work, but it's close enough to re-establish
him as one of our premiere genre filmmakers.
One Tuesday morning in New
York City, strange things begin to happen. A woman in central park
stabs herself in the neck with a hair pin and construction workers fall
to their deaths after simply walking off the edge of their building.
At a nearby high school, science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and
his students are sent home because of the strange phenomenon. Some
kind of neurotoxin hit the Central Park area, shutting down people's sense
of self-preservation and causing them to commit suicide after a few moments
of disorientation. People are taking no chances, and Elliot's friend
Julian (John Leguizamo) buys train tickets for he, his daughter Jess (Ashlyn
Sanchez), Elliot and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel). The Moores'
marriage is going through a hard time, with Alma keeping secret a single
dinner date with a co-worker (Shayamalan, his voice heard briefly on her
cell phone) who's now stalking her. Julian's wife is to meet them
when they all reach Philadelphia. But before they even get there,
the toxin hits the City of Brotherly Love, the train stops and everyone
is kicked off in the middle of nowhere by confused workers who've lost
contact with the outside world. TV broadcasts make it clear that
the toxin is now pretty much everywhere in the Northeast, and then the
power goes out, sending everyone scrambling to find a ride out of Pennsylvania.
Julian's wife had been detoured to Princeton, NJ, but he can't reach her
on the phone and finds a ride in that direction, trusting Jess with Elliot
and Alma. As the toxin hits smaller and smaller areas, they're forced
to seek refuge away from other people. But how can anyone survive
when the source of the toxin seems to be the very plant life that surrounds
us?
It's been a tough couple
years for the world at the movies, and you've got to wipe out at least
a couple states to even get our attention anymore. But the
disaster that engulfs my backyard (I'm just gonna chalk myself up as one
of the survivors if you don't mind) in The Happening is as thematically
rich as it is unique. Plants, we're told again and again, quickly
evolve to adapt to their surroundings, including generating new toxins
to kill their predators. And there's a special irony to the notion
that the zeal with which we attack our own environment is, in fact, suicidal.
So, why not finish the job for us, nature reasons? But Shayamalan's
flora is not really self-aware: it simply responds to the emotions
of the people around it. I've walked through Central Park exactly
once in my life, and at the time was really taken by how stressed, beaten
down, angry all those New Yorkers were even on their leisurely day
off: it's not a stretch to me to imagine that collective malice as
the trigger for such an event. Of course, all this is simply what
the movie strongly suggests to be behind the horrors visited upon the Northeast.
There is no “proof”, no scene where Elliot pleads to the Mother Tree for
mankind's survival. The Happening does most of its' thematic
business quietly, focusing its' narrative energy on slapping us silly.
In ratcheting his horiffic
style up from the traditional PG-13 to his first-ever R-rating, Shayamalan
employs some interesting strategies. The movie contains not a single
“boo!” shock, the most important tool in making PG-13 horror work.
Instead, he employs a rhythm of escalating tension, establishing the horrors
to come in the background of shots, hinting at them with noises, letting
us and the characters slowly notice and then BAM! dropping the hammer.
His imagery is enormously disturbing as it references the unthinkable ease
with which we could all end our lives at any moment. This is particularly
true of the early scene with the construction workers, which is a masterpiece
of visual and auditory horror, buoyed by a sensational one-scene performance
by Cornell Womack as the Foreman whose heart breaks even as the horrors
overwhelm him. But as the film goes on, the deaths develop an EC
Comics inventiveness (you don't see a man run himself over with a lawnmower
every day) that makes the “what's he gonna think of next?” more fun than
you'd expect even as your mouth is agape. And against all odds, The
Happening is a LOT of fun: Shayamalan knows that when we're scared,
we really want to laugh (there's even a scene about this idea, where Elliot
comforts the terrified Jess by convincing her to laugh), and after he's
freaked us out with the opening scenes, he alternates Scare, Laugh, Scare,
Laugh brilliantly throughout the second and third acts. And these
aren't cheap laughs: he never punctures the reality of his nightmare
world, he just lets people be people in the face of it.
The key to much of the movie's
humor is the nature of Elliot: taking the role and playing it in
this manner is a really gutsy choice for Wahlberg, because he's going so
hard against his niche that a lot of people are going to call him wooden
or wussy when in fact this is one of his best performances. Elliot
is something of a dork, so good and true to the bone that his astonished
reactions not only to the horrors around him but to the way everyone else
reacts to them are delightful. He HAS to be this good, the way the
movie ends makes it clear that only a man like him could play the role
he has to play, but he's also a great guy to spend this time with.
For a time, he, Alma and Jess are joined on the run by two teens (Spencer
Breslin and Robert Bailey Jr.), and he's right back in teacher mode, refusing
to take food from a seemingly abandoned house even in this dark hour:
“What are we now, a gang?” Wahlberg is soft but strong, goofy and
brave, and altogether one of the year's most memorable movie protagonists.
I love Deschanel, who was utterly perfect in The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy, and here she's just right as the kind of woman who'd
both marry a guy like Elliot and then also chafe against it. She
can't conquer some early dialog that works too hard to establish her character,
but once the plot kicks in, her natural quirkiness works perfectly with
Wahlberg's goofiness to cut against the grain of the movie's horrors.
Sanchez is convincingly terrorized as the child in tow with them, and Leguizamo
has some great scenes as her father (his last is particularly impressive).
Betty Buckley owns the Tim Robbins role as a strange old woman whose house
the Moores happen upon.
Desperately needing to bounce
back from his recent failures, Shayamalan does a great job setting the
right mood for a story that's more wide open (pretty much the whole movie
takes place outside on sunny days) and spirited than we expect from him.
The film is both ruthlessly brutal and humanist in the right measure, and
while his script is good, his direction is sensational, always seeming
to know where to point the camera for maximum impact. Look at a long
tracking shot when the toxin hits Philadelphia, where a cop shoots himself
in the head, dropping his gun, which is picked up by a man who gets out
of his car, who then shoots himself in the head, only to have the gun picked
up by a woman standing nearby, and study the perfection with which he shows
us roughly 50% of the relevant visual information, giving us enough to
see the horrible design of what's happening, but also holding back in the
right places to add tension and fear. Once it becomes clear that
the toxin is airborne, the wind becomes a character all its' own:
we can never know what's in the air the characters are breathing, but the
wind seems to pursue them, thrusting the plants around them in their direction
with impersonal malice that's a wonder to behold. Then it takes on
another aspect altogether during the climax, a sequence of simple, quiet
humanity that lets you draw your own conclusions about what has ultimately
happened (I know what mine are, and the entire movie is really informed
by what happens at the end of Elliot and Alma's adventure). The movie
has a vibe strongly reminiscent of the topical sci-fi/horror of the 60's
(Twilight Zone comparisons are inevitable), right down to James
Newton Howard's spookily retro score.
The Happening is a
Summer movie roller coaster ride in the truest sense: the drops are
terrifying and you can't stop yourself from giggling at what you've just
endured. It's also a smart, sentimental story about people struggling
to survive in a world gone mad, rife with topical subtext you can take
or leave depending upon your level of interest. M. Night Shayamalan,
one of our most talented and original filmmakers, is back. |
