At no point in the film do any of these actors wear any other expression.

Major spoilers inevitable. Do not read if you plan to see this movie:

I am hopelessly devoted to M. Night Shyamalan.

I have seen all of his films since The Sixth Sense in their opening weekends. I will continue seeing all of his films in their opening weekends. M. Night Shyamalan is a singular visionary, a unique voice in American filmmaking, and with The Happening, following Lady in the Water, he is the creator of two of the most batshit, laughably puerile works of high-budget outsider art I could ever hope to see. Somewhere along the line, probably during or immediately following the production of The Village, Shyamalan simply cracked - bowing under the pressure of being prematurely dubbed his generation’s Spielberg, no longer able to hamfistedly join his blandly generic and ruthlessly conservative spiritualism to self-conscious genre play and O. Henry twists. He is no longer making films for human beings; his work is self-contained, hermetic, defiantly ‘wrong’ and with a pissant’s smarminess. His ensuing films are unlike any others being made in America these days. They play entirely within internal logics baffling to his putative audience. The aesthetic decisions which comprise them - acting, dialogue, editing - are at odds with nearly every popular tradition of the last 70 years.

A bit of background: it was not easy to see this film last night. Approaching the theater, the rain pouring, I was nearly run over by a car. The 10:10 screening at the Regal in Union Square sold out, so we bought tickets for the 10:50. We (me and my lovely girlfriend Alex) went out for a bit, came back at 10:35 to find that the theater we were to see the film in was nearly entirely packed: no two consecutive seats remained, because of Regal’s incredibly stupid layout: the theater is divided into two sets of five chairs a piece, meaning that two couples can sit, but three cannot, ensuring that there are plenty of blank single seats.

So we didn’t go to the 10:50. Instead we decided to pop into the first 30 minutes of Iron Man again, and then headed to the 12:10 show of The Happening, for which we found comfortable, centered seats. After some trailers for movies I don’t want to see, our feature presentation started. The laughs were nearly immediate.

To summarize, briefly: in The Happening, plants have decided to kill off the population of the eastern seaboard as a defense mechanism. They do so by emitting a neurotoxin that compels its victims toward often ridiculous suicide (one sequence features a zookeeper feeding himself to lions, his arm sockets pneumatically spraying karo syrup like in the Black Knight sequence from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is a science teacher who spouts ridiculous stuff like “I don’t know if you guys have heard about this article in the New York Times? Apparently honey bees are disappearing all around the country … Don’t you guys care about the bees?” to disinterested students and whose relationship with wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) is challenged by her - shock and horror - having gone to eat tiramisu with a coworker (Elliot, upon learning of his wife’s horrible indiscretion: “You LIED TO ME?” At this point of maximum annoying personal melodrama, the scene gracefully fades to black). John Leguizamo plays Elliot’s doomed minority best friend, a math teacher who, trying to calm down a woman panicking about her certain death, utters what may someday become a cult punchline: “I AM GOING TO TELL YOU A MATH RIDDLE” and proceeds to do so. Her idiotic answers and his smarmy responses make us happy when the car they are in collides with a tree. Surviving the accident, Leguizamo grants the audience a favor by being infected with the neurotoxin and slicing his wrists open with a piece of glass. We no longer have to follow this annoying character or be asked any more math riddles. Instead, the film follows Elliott, Alma, and Leguizamo’s quiet daughter as they try to survive in the ever-windy Pennsylvania landscape. The result is that the latter half of the film devolves into a banal play at survival horror - the three must make pains not to band close to any other group of people, lest the trees motivate a wind to come along (?) which would blow neurotoxins on the three of them.

Pardon me for overindulging in my above outsider art metaphor, but I think it’s instructive: If Lady in the Water was Shyamalan’s hopelessly naive attempt to reaffirm the role of the Old Narratives - authorship, the fairy tale, good-and-evil, magic - in modern society, a street-preacher-Holiness-church-Flavor-Aid-and-cyanide-drinking solemn affirmation to G-A-W-D like James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, The Happening reveals the darker side of Shyamalan’s delusional mindset. It is a hateful, blinded fantasy of the death of humanity, in which Shyamalan leads blank-faced cardboard cutouts of people through a litany of grotesque suicidal and homicidal scenarios. There are no characters here - simply sinners in the hands of an angry biosphere being punished for wronging Mother Nature. We are led through expository dialogue after expository dialogue to understand what is at stake here: not only are plants using neurotoxins to kill off the population of the eastern seaboard, but they are increasingly sensitive to human presence, so that even one or two people can set off a breezy storm of neurotoxin, a sick reversal of sorts on Matthew 18:20. As an expression of a filmmaker’s rage toward his fellow man, it is without equal - as pure a self-revealing display of sociopathy as Henry Darger’s brutal, similarly childish fantasy The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. And as a film, it is a crushing, hilarious failure.

Let’s start with the obvious: painfully stilted dialogue (the above examples should suffice), incomprehensible, retardedly hole-filled plotting (by holing oneself in a ramshackle house, Wahlberg manages to escape the dangerous neurotoxin, since pollen can’t get into a house through things like keyholes, cracks in the doors, faulty caulking), and, at the center, two of the worst performances I’ve ever seen in a movie. Zooey Deschanel almost has an excuse: in a continuation of Shyamalan’s inability to write female characters, her Alma is written to behave like a petulant, overindulged child. To achieve this unlikeable character, Deschanel sets her eyes to ‘maximum’ setting and places her lips into a sullen pout. Mark Wahlberg has no such excuse: though his ‘character’ is underwritten, his line readings are simply inconceivable, just off-the-wall hopeless. I was shocked - shocked - that this actor, who is the best thing about multiple films he’s been in (I <3 Huckabees, The Departed) is so irredeemably awful here. What’s clear is that this is not a failure chiefly of the actors - this is a one-time gifted director who has completely lost his touch, lost his ability to identify what his actors need to do in order to convincingly express emotion.

But the worst thing of all is Shyamalan’s smugness, which is on full display here. No longer content to simply insert himself as ‘the author whose works will change the world’ as he did in Lady in the Water, here Shyamalan explicitly tells his audience, repeatedly, that he is unwilling to explain why the plants are doing what they’re doing, why now, why here. Instead, characters state that they are unable to explain science or nature - that these things simply happen, and that we shouldn’t expect our narratives to be so tightly constructed. Fuck you, you lazy shit.

Yet moments linger for me: a gauzy, oversaturated image of Deschanel cradling young Ashlyn Sanchez in her arms against a fence (the film was shot by the masterful Tak Fujimoto, who lensed Malick’s Badlands), the extraordinarily theatrical performance of Betty Buckley as a deranged primitivist shut-in (the stuff, in a perfect world, that drag icons would be made of - when she announces her presence to Wahlberg with a bizarre “You eyein’ my lemon drink?”, it is as though the radiant day-glo pink sun of camp that is this entire film has just supernovaed), the way the camera lingers on a close-up image of a car carelessly backing over some weeds while turning around. This last instance is remarkable to me - a clearheaded but ultimately asinine and trivial bit of finger-pointing. I can’t dismiss it all - Shyamalan’s an idiot, but cinematically, at least to an extent, the man knows what he’s doing, and every decision he’s making has some sort of weird logic to it. Even if what he’s doing is wrong and premised on bafflingly stupid ideas.

As long as Shyamalan, whom no one can deny is one of the most unique filmmakers we’ve got, continues to make movies, I will always see them. And if they’re as entertainingly ridiculous as The Happening, I will feel honored to do so.

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