Movie review: The Happening

by John P. Meyer

Maybe, in retrospect, it wasn't such a good idea for M. Night Shyamalan to release his new movie The Happening on Friday the 13th. April 1st might have been more appropriate, particularly for those who were hoping for another creepy, twisty and ultimately satisfying M. Night outing.

Full disclosure: I'm a big M. Night fan. Unbreakable ranks right up there with my favorite movies of the new century. The Village's genuine eeriness outweighed its telegraphed plot punch in my book. And when Mel Gibson told Joaquin Phoenix (in Signs) to "swing away," I got a little thrill of redemptive pleasure from it on the character's behalf. Heck, I even liked Lady in the Water, and I'm secure enough in my emotional armor to admit it.

But this time... ouch!

The Happening starts out with typical M. Night offbeat promise, chronicling a wave of bizarre, inexplicable suicides taking place in and around New York City's Central Park. As the promos for the film trumpet, this is Shyamalan's first R-rated movie, and it's rated R for the grisly violence, including frank depictions of stabbings, gunshots to the head, and - most horribly - human bodies slamming into the ground at the base of a construction site.

Cut to the high school where science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is soliciting guesses from his students as to why honey bees are disappearing all over the U.S. It's decided amongst the class that - regardless of how far scientific knowledge advances - there will always be "forces at work beyond our understanding."

There transpires an administrative meeting in which the teachers are told that they and their students should go home because of a suspected terrorist attack on the city. Details are sketchy, but apparently there's some sort of biological agent responsible for the spreading epidemic of self-slaughter. School's out, with a vengeance.

Elliot and his friend and fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo) make plans to grab up their wives (and - in Julian's case - his daughter) and blow this big city pop stand without further adieu. Being lame-ass citified folk, they have no cars, and thus must head to the train station and points west. (It seems the suicide epidemic - which they're hearing more and more news reports about - is confined to the Northeast U.S.)

Given that they're operating under the assumption that some kind of deadly gas has been released on the city, the metropolis-wide evacuation proceeds in amazingly orderly fashion, with no one attempting to jump queue on the train platform but rather calmly awaiting their turn to flee imminent death. (Yeah, right.)

Once aboard the moving train, people begin hearing (on radios, via cell phone) of more and more outbreaks of the suicidal plague. When the train stops at a podunk station in rural Pennsylvania, Elliot confronts the conductors to find out what's up. "We've lost contact," one of them tells him. "With who?", Elliot asks. "With everyone," intones the conductor, ominously. Which causes one to wonder why the railroad management have deprived their employees of modern communication devices, since passengers on the train have been conversing with their far-flung friends and relations without interruption.

For some arcane reason, the train crew decides that this will be the end of the line and refuses to haul their human cargo any farther, though doing so would stand a good chance of saving all their lives. But, of course, they've lost contact. With everyone.

After descending like a horde of human locusts on the small town diner, the abandoned train passengers eat pie and watch TV (Train conductors? Hello! Outside world calling!) until they've heard enough to figure out that the plague is spreading fast, but that only a hundred miles or so to the west, all is well. DASH FOR THE CARS!

Elliot and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel, looking wide-eyed and bewildered for most of her screen time) hook up with a kindly - if somewhat goofy - couple who operate the local nursery. The cockeyed owner (Frank Collison) explains his theory about the deadly goings-on, and it has the ring of truth. Without giving away the whole vegetarian enchilada, it seems Mother Nature's pissed off by human depredations and she's not going to take it any more.

Elliot and Alma, along with Julian's daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), take off with a group under the leadership of a soldier from a nearby military facility (Jeremy Strong) who plan to hightail it for the deep rural Pennsylvanian outback, having determined that the population centers are getting hit hardest by the suicide epidemic. We should note that they're all on foot by now, having further determined that it's not safe on the roads. After half of the group falls prey to the self-extinction craze, the remainder realize that it's only by splitting up into small groups that they can avoid the madness.

Our protagonists eventually end up at an isolated farmstead owned by a weird woman named Mrs. Jones (North Texas native Betty Buckley), who's so paranoid already that telling her about the rampant suicide plague seems like a bad idea. When even Mrs. Jones' little enclave is hit by the bug, all seems lost. Or will love conquer all and carry the day?

(Did that last part sound trite? Did to me, too. Just as the climax of the movie seemed.)

Buried within this illogical mess are some bravura stylistic touches - the gun used by a succession of suicidal zombies to shoot themselves, one after another; the crossroad where all paths lead to madness; the sign on the outskirts of a subdivision which exclaims, "You deserve this." - but they're pinned to nothing. By the end of the movie, our interest has evaporated into thin air, like the evanescent clouds pictured in the opening credits.

SO DID I: "I forgot where I am." - first line of dialogue in the movie

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