WHEN a malicious breeze begins to blow in “The Happening,” fear sets in – the fear that the only thing that will occur is the Shyamalan hitting the fan. Someday this movie’s principal claim to fame will be that it inspired an episode of The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror (“The Crappening”?).
Let’s review the oeuvre of M. Night Shyamalan since “The Sixth Sense”: stupid ending, stupid ending, stupid ending and, in a change of pace with his last film, “Lady in the Water,” stupid all the way through.
For his latest trick, this back-room-of-the-Ramada magician has given us: no trick at all. “The Happening” has no ending. I count that as an improvement over “The Village” and “Unbreakable,” each of which concluded with one of the fastest audience stampedes out of a theater I’ve ever seen.
“The Happening” is about unexplained outbreaks of mass suicide in several Northeastern cities. Shyamalan has a lot of fun imagining cool ways you could kill yourself if you weren’t afraid of pain. Drive your jeep into a tree? Too obvious. How about lying down in front of an industrial-size lawnmower or punching out a window with your skull?
A pair of schoolteachers (Mark Wahlberg, John Leguizamo) and the wife (Zooey Deschanel) of the Wahlberg character try to guess what’s happening as the background boils with speculation. Could it be terrorism? Does it have to do with bees? How about chemical weapons seeping out of the CIA? Since we’re (as always, with M. Night) in Pennsylvania, there are unique potential sources of toxins to worry about, such as Three Mile Island and Philadelphia Eagles fans.
There is a lot of chatter about global warming, about science, about geometric progression, about ecological disaster. “Calculus, calculus, calculus!” someone mutters, but if those are the only remaining options, I’d just as soon saw my neck open on the nearest broken window, too.
As in “The War of the Worlds,” rumor takes over and people’s immediate reaction is to flee somewhere, anywhere, shooting whoever gets in their way. But the story isn’t a puzzle in which scenes yield more pieces that the audience tries to learn how to put together. It’s just setup, setup, setup, the end. When Betty Buckley turns up as a bitter off-the-grid loner, such is Shyamalan’s dismal track record that you suspect right away that she serves no purpose except to pad the running time.
Shyamalan has hit on something, though, and he does set up an IV drip of tension. The moment is right for a movie like this. Eco-unease and terrorism are in the air, both of them (for many) carrying the stink of our own sins as a plausible root cause. It wouldn’t take much to persuade today’s audience that the answer blowin’ in the wind is that a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
With a slightly brainier imagination at work, “The Happening” could have been a spooky little art film whose purpose wasn’t so much to tell a linear story as to strum on our inner sense of looming catastrophe, the unanswered questions adding to the dread.
That would call on skills Shyamalan has not shown since his only good movie: making characters interesting and dressing up dialogue with something other than plodding functionality (“Whatever is happening is happening to smaller and smaller populations”), red herrings (“We had tiramisu together. That is it!”) or dull jokes (“I’m talking to a plastic plant.”).
Laying down a witty or ironic subtext, as Stanley Kubrick would have, is not within Shyamalan’s powers. Kubrick’s films are made to be pondered over repeated viewings. No one will watch any of Shyamalan’s recent films twice. A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.