Horticulture Wars

[June 11th, 2008]

“Apparently, honeybees are just disappearing all over the country,” schoolteacher Mark Wahlberg informs his Philadelphia high-school science class at the outset of The Happening. “This is scary, huh?” His tone—solicitous, overeager, like a nanny telling a spooky story to a fairly dim kindergartner—confirms the approach that director M. Night Shyamalan is going to take in his latest chiller. Even before Professor Wahlberg begins his bug-holocaust lecture, Shyamalan has announced his pedantic intentions with two scenes in New York City’s Central Park: A lovely young woman on a park bench pierces her own throat with a hairpin, and construction workers leap to their deaths from scaffolds. Unnerving stuff, to be sure—or it would be, if each self-destruction weren’t punctuated by a stab of James Newton Howard’s string score, each note another nudge in the ribs: “This is scary, huh?”

It isn’t. In fact, after a very short time it’s kind of funny. And then it’s just sad. Once a wunderkind of suspense manipulation—infamous for his third-act twists but watched for every adroit set piece that came before—M. Night Shyamalan has recoiled from the disaster of Lady in the Water by making his first lazy movie, a picture that grinds from one obligatory shock to another. Even the title is clumsy: Long after I realized The Happening was about Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and their teaching colleagues on the run from an airborne neurotoxin that provokes suicide, I kept waiting for the film to transform into a groovy, consciousness-expanding love-in. No such luck. Instead, in what may be the funniest moment in this year’s cinema, horrified commuters who’ve been told they’re fleeing a terrorist attack stop to watch a cell-phone video of a zookeeper wandering into a den of lions and getting both his arms torn off. “Mother of God,” a woman cries, “what kind of terrorists are these?”

Actually, that’s the second-silliest moment in The Happening, which reaches bold new levels of inanity once the heroes are stranded in the rural burg of Filbert, Pennsylvania, and the true premise is exposed. (The revelation can hardly be called a twist, since it arrives before the halfway mark, but those who want to groan for themselves should probably skip to the last paragraph.) It turns out that the source of the toxin is not terrorists but…plants. Just plants. Not certain plants, either. All of them. The green ones, basically. The breeze blows through the plants, they release their invisible pollen into the air, and everybody in breathing range starts throwing themselves under riding lawnmowers. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a repeat of the scene from The Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West releases the narcolepsy-inducing poppies.

And indeed, the audience is highly likely to fall asleep during this movie, because when it isn’t ludicrous—as it is in a scene where Wahlberg bargains with a potted tree—it’s deadly dull. Shyamalan, who in Signs and even The Village orchestrated tension through careful editing, has reduced himself to the following formula: Cut to a close-up of Mark Wahlberg staring into a field. Cut to a medium shot of grass rippling in the wind. Cut to Wahlberg running away. Cut to more grass. Cut to Wahlberg running. Cut to grass. Cue strings. That’s what we call suspense, people!

It’s not like there aren’t some good ideas in The Happening—the concept of death arriving as a sudden, hazy madness, like a fatal panic attack, is authentically unnerving. But Shyamalan telegraphs his every move so obviously (“We’re in a small town, Jess,” Deschanel assures a child. “Nothing will happen to us here”) that the movie’s B-grade horror feels like an act of contempt from a director who has seen his most beloved ideas rejected by audiences as well as critics. Lady in the Water was a folly, to be sure, but The Happening is self-loathing trash. In one of those many running scenes, Wahlberg passes a tract-housing billboard that proclaims, “You Deserve This!” Maybe this film is what the moviegoing public deserves, but it’s a shame to watch M. Night Shyamalan disdainfully hand it to them.