M. Night Shyamalan thinks he is our modern-day Alfred Hitchcock; actually, he is closer in spirit to Orson Welles.
Welles was a director beset with image problems, who was unable to outgrow his reputation as the director of the masterpiece “Citizen Kane.” Each subsequent picture was compared with “Citizen Kane” and often failed to measure up. Eventually, critics stopped looking at the artistic merits of his films and instead focused on his declining box-office receipts.
The same could be said of Shyamalan. Following his smash hit “The Sixth Sense,” each new release was greeted with yawns and a sneer on his dip in earnings. The all-seeing light of “The Sixth Sense” was used to scrutinize his films: Shyamalan relies on twist endings, mars films with his unaccomplished acting and has egos that do not fit in his sac.
Like most generalizations, these criticisms do have an element of truth. Almost all his films end with twists, a tic derived from his penchant for tying up all loose ends. However, the flip side is that for a twist to be successful, it must have audiences invested in the suspense of the story. That this is often the case cannot be disputed.
This brief excursion is necessary in understanding the cold critical reception to Shyamalan’s latest film “The Happening.” The Pavlovian revulsion to any mention of his name is partly because audiences are stuck in the Sixth Sense era, thereby failing to notice how much he has grown as a filmmaker. This reaction is also the result of the conflation of box-office success and artistic excellence.
I refuse to be bullied into condemning “The Happening.” It is an admirable effort from a talented director.
“The Happening” begins in New York’s Central Park where an ordinary day turns bizarre as people begin committing suicide. This phenomenon quickly spreads to other parts of New York and eventually to most of the Northeast. We later learn the infections are spread by plants.
The film focuses on a science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) who is leading a group, including his wife (Zooey Deschanel) and a friend’s daughter, on a flight from the infected areas to a place of safety.
The direction was a mixed bag. A couple of high angle close up shots were effective, as was the sequence involving bodies falling downward into the camera. The slow pace was also appropriate.
The dialogue was mediocre, the casting off-putting and the acting ridiculous. The actors rushed through their parts with the enthusiasm they would have had if they were swimming in chilled molasses. Wahlberg was out of his depth as a science teacher; it did not help that Shyamalan resorted to close-up shots of Wahlberg’s face to express nonexistent emotion. The truth is there is nothing interesting about Wahlberg’s rectangular visage.
In their haste to deride the film and its maker, certain critics complained about the unoriginality of the suicides and the unintentional humor of some scenes. My question is why George Romero and his living dead should get a free pass on macabre laughs? Complaints like these have reduced intelligent criticism to a banal description of images and plot, as if a film is the sum of all its edited shots.
Shyamalan has produced in “The Happening” a film that captures the relationship between mass media and mass hysteria, while perfectly portraying post-Sept. 11 angst. Shared emotions from a catastrophe bring people together; the lure of survival pushes them apart – during the apocalypse people will not be saved, only individuals.
In “Signs,” Shyamalan briefly touched on the creation of fear through television. Intricate patterns on farmlands had spontaneously appeared in countries as far apart as Mexico and India. Were these landing spots for alien life forms, or were they simply pranks perpetrated on an international scale?
Here the news of the horrendous infections is first carried by television networks, then through cellphones and finally a battery-powered radio. Mass media, as tools of the corporate class, are designed as money-making ventures, not services for public. Their emphasis is therefore on churning out news as fast as possible without considering accuracy, meaning the public is fed sound bites out of context. Therefore we have news programs presenting poll results as news events, hired talking heads with nothing to say spewing statistics and governments keeping citizens in fear with color-coded terror alerts.
While the question of how the infection is spread is easily figured out, the more important question is why. Shyamalan makes it difficult to answer, which makes the initial park scene more remarkable.
Warfare was initially carried out only on enemy military installations. But in this age of supranational terror organizations, everyone and everywhere is a legitimate target. What, then, is scarier than seeing people drop dead in serene spots like Central Park, the Washington Monument or even Hollywood Boulevard?
“The Happening” is not a train wreck, but rather a noble failure from a determined director who takes his craft seriously.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]