The Happening (2008)

I went with a friend to a free screening of Quarantine a few days ago, and the picture is as good a B-programmer released from Screen Gems to pay the bills during Halloween as you’re likely to expect or receive. The picture has an appealing William Castle quality that it sadly undercuts with violence too explicit and off-putting for such a frivolous, stupid movie. You want to laugh with it, but there’s a queasiness to it that belongs in a major horror picture. Quarantine still, despite amateurish performances, more effectively evokes societal breakdown than M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening. Shyamalan has seemingly succumbed to a disease common in our newer generations of filmmakers – he strives to “auteur” himself prematurely. Shyamalan, a wannabe Hitchcock or Spielberg, acts as both a filmmaker and his own critic-champion - his own Truffaut or Kael - defending him against those who wish to write him off as a reveler in genre muck. Shyamalan is a victim of our magic-bullet-quick-fix-want-it-now culture, he doesn’t have the patience to spend years turning out forgettable to efficient to brilliant thrillers with little to no appreciation; he seeks knighthood now, before he’s conquered the beast and entertained us effectively, consistently. And, until Lady in the Water, the snow-job has worked, because Shyamalan does have a primal talent – he has none of Spielberg or Hitchcock’s range, but there is a similar instinct for the little mundane things that accumulate to dread. Shyamalan could be a first class genre filmmaker if he could ever cut the auteur quest and drop the pop-religious-uplift banality that’s equal parts ego, condescension, and embarrassing naiveté.

There’s also an equal-opposite weakness to Shyamalan’s proficiency in shallow thriller mechanics - a startling ineptitude with emotional texture. Shyamalan’s debt to The Twilight Zone has been widely acknowledged, and I keep waiting for one of his films to nab the punch line of one of the most unsettling episodes, where the heroine discovers she’s a mannequin, on temporary vacation from imprisonment in a warehouse. All of Shyamalan’s pictures, unknowingly, are working toward this chillingly irrational joke. No Shyamalan character has ever been allowed a convincing reaction to the otherworldly, or even worldly, traumas that grip them. The children are drones, creepy little adults incapable of panic or irritation. The adults are Antonioni or Kubrick characters, without the irony built in. Shyamalan rips off all the right people to support his hubris, but he perversely borrows all of the right legends’ worst tendencies: Hitchcock’s plot at the expense of character; Kubrick’s tonal monotony; Spielberg’s desperate homespun pathos; Antonioni’s fashion statement ennui.

The crap rises to the top in The Happening, because Shyamalan’s gifts for misdirection – his slow-burn timing, his movie-sense composition – abandon him here, and all that remains is the flat, amateurish-expository dialogue and the school-prig moralizing. Imagine a fourth rate Bergman remaking The Day of the Triffids and you’re close to the strange mixture of art and genre constipation that grips The Happening, which is essentially a weak-sauce retread of Shyamalan’s canniest picture, Signs. The Happening is one of the worst mainstream big-budget studio pictures I can remember seeing; it’s a full, dispiriting, approximation of what a talented-pretentious high school student would do with a few B-stars and sixty million dollars. And there’s, even for Shyamalan, an offensive, appalling breach of common sense that works its way towards insensitivity. Facing a potential collapse of society, a father leaves his wife behind so she can buy a gift. Having predictably lost his wife, the same father leaves his little girl behind so he can find the wife. The little girl, of course, takes it all in the usual flat, mute, glass-eyed stride that’s essential of all Shyamalan children. Another’s wife, faced with said collapse of society, confesses her deepest betrayal to her husband – a rendezvous with a co-worker over tiramisu. Shyamalan’s humor has always been labored, but here it’s something worse than embarrassing: his humor, and overall temperament, is supernaturally disconnected from anything resembling American middle-class life. Recent Spielberg pictures have been accused of being out-of-touch, and those criticisms are half-and-half on-the-mark, but those critics haven’t seen anything yet.

Many brilliant-great-good-ok directors make bad pictures, but The Happening, and parts of The Village and Lady in the Water, are so bad they retroactively deteriorate our enjoyment of the Shyamalan pictures that worked or most worked, such as Unbreakable and most of Signs. The Happening is the cinematic equivalent of pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz, and our deflation at a once promising talent is similar to Dorothy’s. Put Mel Brooks’ name on The Happening and you have his most precise parody since Young Frankenstein. The very premise of the picture is oddly, accidentally, revealing – the world is forced to outrun, and own up to, air. Shyamalan, to survive as a filmmaker, will have to come to terms with (hot) air himself.

Posted on October 12th, 2008 in Reviews, Horror, 2008 |

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