Constant Viewer: The Happening

Let this much be said at the outset. In the heretofore consistently downhill career of M. Night Shyamalan, it has finally proven beyond even his uncanny knack for making a worse movie every time out when the last movie in question happens to be Lady in the Water.

Of course, you might be saying to yourself right now that Constant Viewer isn’t being fair here. Lady in the Water barely even qualifies as a movie. It is, at best, the cinematic equivalent of a fairy tale written not for a very young child but by a very young child. And an unusually untalented child, at that. Point taken. Still, it must be admitted that The Happening is not nearly as bad a movie as The Lady in the Water.

Not that The Happening is a good movie, mind you. Like every single one of Shyamalan’s movies after The Sixth Sense (and, okay, maybe Unbreakable), it sucks. In fact, it sucks almost exactly as badly as The Village sucked – CV is the proud possessor of a calibrated suckometer – which raises an interesting question. If we graphically plotted the degree of suckatude of each one of Shymalan’s movies, would we get a parabola? That would mean his next film would suck only as badly as Signs and the next two might actually be watchable and then even good!

The Happening tells the story of a science teacher and his wife who, together with the daughter of a friend and an ever shrinking group of strangers, try to escape from a deadly and rapidly spreading phenomenon. Beginning without warning or explanation in New York City’s Central Park, people suddenly, well, let’s just say they volunteer to become the sort of people Haley Joel Osment’s character could see in The Sixth Sense. Those who do not succumb try to escape.

The movie features comically over-the-top performances by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel as the troubled young couple and a barely less broad performance by John Leguizamo as the young girl’s father. Of all the principal characters, only the daughter, played by Ashlyn Sanchez, isn’t preposterous.

CV isn’t a huge fan of any of the principal actors here, but this is a writing and directing problem, pure and simple. Laurence Olivier would have come across as a buffoon given the dialog Shyamalan has handed to Wahlberg & Co. Sadly, if consistently, the camera work only adds to the film’s many problems by, for example, trying to build tension with extreme close-ups that come across instead as simply goofy. In fact, this is the sloppiest movie from a purely technical point of view Shyamalan has made yet.

The Happening has its moments of intentional comedy, as well, intended of course to relieve the very little tension that builds as the movie plods along. David Letterman (whose audience is a bit larger than CV’s readership) let it be known the other night that whenever people started to walk backwards in The Happening, “Watch out!” The extent to which you will be shocked when this happens, however, pretty much depends on whether you’ve ever seen any horror picture made in the last 25 years. The movie is rated R, but CV can’t tell you why. There is certainly no sex, precious little profanity and, although there is a fair amount of overt violence, very little of it is gruesome and none is all that gory.

When it’s all over – the happening, that is, not The Happening – those who survive try to figure out what did, in fact, happen. (In that regard, they are not unlike the movie’s hopefully few and far between viewers, who may be wondering, for example, how just about everyone living in Philadelphia committed suicide but the city is repopulated and humming along as though nothing happened a mere three months later?) Could it have been terrorists? A government experiment gone wrong? Or perhaps “nature” has suddenly evolved a new “defense” against it’s “greatest enemy”? And we all know who that enemy would be, don’t we, Captain Planet fans? Either because it’s suppose to be more mysterious and disquieting that way or, CV's bet, because an interesting and plausible explanation would have required more talented writing, The Happening pretty much leaves the viewer guessing. Assuming, that is, that the viewer gives a rodent’s hindquarters by that point.

But wait! There’s (a little bit) more! Is there any good reason to go see The Happening? Well, if you happen to share CV’s view that France is without question the most ungrateful nation on earth, at least the movie ends on a positive note.