SPOILERS FOR THE HAPPENING AHOY. Sorry, I tried, but I just couldn’t do without.
Before you read anything I write about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening you should stop and read everything Jon Hastings has to say on the subject. He does yeoman’s work as a Shyamalan apologist, trying to defend what were (to him and to me) obviously conscious choices made by Shyamalan in this movie against critics whose (to him and to me) increasingly comical and depressing conservatism led them to believe Shyamalan was trying to make a completely different movie and just screwed it up.* A movie that knows its place, basically. For god’s sake, do these people not understand there’s more than one way to skin a cat?
As you can gather I liked it. I’m not over the moon for it–in Shyamalan’s oeuvre I prefer The Village (haven’t seen The Lady in the Water but I sure am gonna now, and while Jon is quite right to point out that it’s doing something entirely different than Spielberg’s thematically and structurally** similar War of the Worlds, I find I prefer what War of the Worlds did. But the vituperative response to it is really completely unjustified. And while I know it’s a mug’s game to dismiss critics on an ad hominem basis, it’s tough for me to see the hostile reaction as anything but its own ad hominem rejection of Shyamalan for being too serious and too big for his britches, refusing to deliver the crowd-pleasers he’s apparently supposed to be delivering. That, and as I alluded to above, I’m literally sitting here shaking my head that people could watch (say) Mark Wahlberg’s performance in this movie, or John Leguizamo’s, and it doesn’t occur to them that they weren’t gunning for The Departed in terms of acting style. It’s like people complaining that Nicholson was over the top in The Shining.
I think the way to look at The Happening is as a satire with violence instead of comedy. (I’m a big fan of this kind of substitution, hence my theory that Eyes Wide Shut is a horror movie with sex instead of violence.) What you have here is a film in which the Earth basically decides to take a small corner of itself and murder all the people on it that it can. Then it stops, and then at the end of the film it picks another corner and starts again. Throughout, the horror imagery is of people calmly methodically killing themselves–in essence, reducing everyone’s personal stories and goals and ethics to a bloody punchline.
The death that struck me hardest is that of John Leguizamo’s grumpy, sort of unlikeable math teacher. Here’s a guy who despite the possibility of losing his own wife still finds the time to make his buddy’s wife, who he’s never liked, feel like a piece of shit; who also has the presence of mind to help keep a fellow survivor calm by getting her to work through a math puzzle in lieu of freaking out; then BOOM, he wanders out of a car wreck that killed his fellow passengers, plops himself down in the middle of the road, grabs a piece of glass and goes to work on his wrist. And when you think about it, what are the final two scenes–life goes on with Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, while life ends in Paris–but that same sick joke writ large?
So yeah, what I like about The Happening is that it’s the anti-Signs Not that I didn’t like Signs, because I do, it’s just that this movie is nihilistic where that one was optimistic perhaps to a fault. Is Shyamalan really this angry about climate change? Did the critics just break him down? Who knows, but I’ll eat it. As Wahlberg sing-songily deduces his way through the catastrophe, people keep dying and dying, and as he and his wife (and the poor little girl they’re supposed to be keeping safe) decide to make one last grand gesture of love, the dying stops, and ultimately it’s all sort of meaningless. Meanwhile a billboard outside a model-home McMansion poised to turn the middle of nowhere into an exurb proclaims, in the familiar and infuriating language of American advertising, “You Deserve This!” Indeed.
* Surely the Betty Buckley sequence illustrates that Shyamalan knows how to be really, really scary and could do so throughout the film if he felt like it. He didn’t!
** Very similar, in fact: initial urban outbreak, flight through the highways and byways, commandeered cars, the shattering of ad hoc groups, savagery among survivors, offerer of refuge becomes immediate threat and also happens to be nuts, last horrible moments, threat peters out, kinda happy ending. Shyamalan just adds an extra scene that shifts the balance, which is just one reason why, as Jon says, it’s incorrect to view him as a Spielberg manqué.
I’m as big a fan of nihilism as the next guy, but this movie sucked balls. I even sort of liked Lady in the Water, and I’m on record as being a fan of everything else Night’s done, so I’m not gunning for him. I just found The Happening to be a total mess. I get that he guns for – or at least tends to encourage thoughts of – him being seen as a modern Hitchcock sort of filmmaker, so he’s fine with plot inconsistencies – Hitch would almost always go for the scare before making sure things made much sense, and made it work – but when you also remove tension or motivation or character or cinematography or editing or any discernible direction whatsoever from the flick, then you’ve got a problem. I mean, I’d like to think that there was some kind of grand theory that he was working towards, some idea he was attempting to illustrate, by making everything so flat and ugly; that scene you described, with Leguizamo slashing his wrists, like everything it just happened, and I felt nothing. It wasn’t scary, it wasn’t well-shot; it was the dullest rash of violent suicides I’ve ever seen. Night has better in him than this, and at this point I take encouraging him as an offense to what talent he has shown before. Don’t encourage him! It’s people!
I will never see this movie, but I love reading you write about it.
i enjoyed The Happening as well… and for the record, i hated Lady in the Water, and The Village bothered me (but mostly because they advertised it as a horror movie)… one thing though, while watching the movie, i found it be less and less suspenseful as the movie went on. i still enjoyed it, but coming off of such an amazing start it just didn’t keep me enthralled watching everyone bicker and fight between themselves. part of me thinks the the way it was shot is to blame. once they leave the city, the shots are very straight on and motionless, relying on the actors expressions, which didn’t always work for me. i feel like some slow zoom ins and outs really could have been quite effective.
Hi Sean –
Good points re: the nihilism. (Loved the You Deserve This!). Because I can’t help myself when it comes to making lists, I’m tempted to break his movies down into the optimistic ones (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Lady in the Water) and the pessimistic ones (Unbreakable, The Village, The Happening).
Jason –
I’m sympathetic to the idea that the dialogue and acting style might not work for everyone. I know a lot of people who find, for example, the Coen Brothers’ movies hard to take because of what they see as “mannered” performances. But there’s lots going on with the cinematography and editing and sound design. The scene that everyone hates, where Wahlberg is trying to figure out the “mystery” while those people shoot themselves over (off screen) on the other side of the field is a good example, IMO. Visually, Shyamalan keeps emphasizing the group vs. individual “theme” of the movie (large groups are a threat to themselves and to “nature”, but life cut off from other people is meaningless/maddening); aurally, we’re kept aware of all this through the gun shots; and the dialogue functions ironically – Wahlberg is trying to figure out how to help the other group, but he actually figures out is that it’s hopeless PLUS he figures this out too late anyway. It’s pretty deliberately put together. Shot-by-shot, this is a very organized and “through-composed” movie.
Channeling David Bordwell, I’d say that what’s distinctive about Shyamalan’s direction is that it is old-fashioned: it’s based on non-bravura long takes. he’s much more likely to let an image sit with us (the tear in the roof of the jeep, the shots of Wahlberg’s group moving across the fields) than to just hit us with them, so we can “parse” it and go on to the next one. He’s also old-fashioned in the way he uses locations: the spring house is a concept right out of one of Fritz Lang’s American movies. But the real reference point is Jacques Tourneur: imagery that seems to come from the border between dreams and nightmares; a distanced, trance-like acting style; a concern with what the camera can’t show.
My argument is that we should approach Shyamalan’s movies as if they were “art house” movies – like we’d approach something like There Will We Blood or Exiled.
Anyway, I’m certainly not trying to tell anyone they have to like the movie, or anything, but I would like to convince you that what you’re not liking is a genuine piece of filmmaking.
-Jon
“That, and as I alluded to above, I’m literally sitting here shaking my head that people could watch (say) Mark Wahlberg’s performance in this movie, or John Leguizamo’s, and it doesn’t occur to them that they weren’t gunning for The Departed in terms of acting style. It’s like people complaining that Nicholson was over the top in The Shining.”
I feel you on the other points (that he MEANT to do what he did with the pacing and the non-answers and the bleak nihilism), but what stood out as especially bothersome to me when I saw this was the bad acting. I just don’t see the reason for delivering the lines in the way they did. You mentioned watching the film as a satire with violence instead of humor and that may be a reason th acting wasn’t in the same ballpark as The Departed, but do you have any other insight as to why things were so slow and disconnected?
As an aside, I love MNS, too, (my favorite may be Lady in the Water) so I went in with an open mind. But that acting just took me out.
Carnival of souls
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