As the first decade of this millennium passes, there’s a focus on the “best of” well, everything. Can’t say I’m above this: in a previous post, I ranked the last ten Best Picture winners, and I’m currently working on an article that ranks the days of the week (screw Thursday).
Why Thursday you ask? Well, because that’s when I sat down with a steaming aluminum tin of General Tso’s chicken and flipped to HBO, where I was greeted by The Happening— M. Night Shymelan’s latest attempt at a film that pretends to be meta while floundering in a story so murky and nonsensical that I often expected President Bill Pullman to enter Independence Day-style and invigorate the National Guard to stop this event happening, or the something eventing, or, whatever.
Since 2004, I was convinced that Taking Lives was the worst movie of the decade and it could not be usurped, but after sitting through The Happening, I was no longer certain. Full disclosure: my viewing was voluntary, though purely out of morbid curiosity.
When I was a kid, I saw a woman get hit by a car. She was propelled over a median, hit by a van coming from the opposite direction, and run over. From then on, vehicle accidents haven’t interested me. I don’t rubber neck because nothing will live up to that image—unless of course if the next person bounces off the hood of the second car and his or her trajectory marries the path of an eighteen-wheel car carrier that clips one end of the body, sending it end over end until it flops onto the leather interior of some aristocrat’s open-roofed convertible Porsche—I saw The Happening as a possible parallel to this scenario.
Taking Lives is still rather awful. There are four primary characters, one of whom is the killer. Since we learn in the first five minutes that the hitchhiking serial killer is male, two are immediately eliminated as suspects. One is Illeana (Angelina Jolie), the special agent assigned to investigate the murders, and the other is the suspected killer’s mother. In a story this pedestrian, twists are expected, but making the serial killer a woman would involve a sex-change story, and that, well, I just pray Brett Ratner never reads this. The third character is [insert character name here]. Played by Kiefer Sutherland, he functions as an additional red-herring just in case everyone has deduced that the killer is in fact the killer, and is then killed in an elevator fire within ten minutes.
Additional note of silliness: throughout the first three quarters of the movie, the suspected serial killer’s mother exposits her son’s insanity and evil doings to the audience and each unnamed character that wonders through the police station; this fashions the killer into a red-herring before exposing him as the killer, which just strikes me as pointless and the result of a dilapidated budget. Seriously? No one could find an actor to play some shady character with a goatee and a shaved head to walk around in combat boots and flannel while shifting his eyes side to side each time an investigating officer passes him on the street? I don’t care where Taking Lives was filmed. I guarantee you a producer could post a universal ad on Craigslist offering a small part to any male who wants to share screen time with Angelina Jolie (this film was pre-JoliePitt daycare center).
While Jolie might be the only saving grace of this film (she’s stunning; that’s all I’ve got), the writing of her character is confused to all hell: she plays a special agent with paranormal investigative powers who physically contorts herself to the position in which the victims died so that she might get into their heads and pick up some psychic remnant, yet she is unable to deduce that the man she is sleeping with is the serial-killer. Right. This quirky, contradictory element seems more the result of adlibbing that wasted too much film to toss it in the trash.
After the audience has been dragged through an unnecessarily convoluted story, Illeana confronts serial killer Costa (Ethan Hawke), but he manages to escape, only to emerge eight months later and lay in waiting at Costa’s secluded hideaway. And guess what has happened in about eight months: Illeana has developed a baby bump, which Costa stabs, causing the audience to yawn since the movie has set us on a path of predictable twists and turns. The final one being Illeana’s removal of her prosthetic pregnancy before killing Costa. (Feels like there should be a Maggie Lizer reference. Next time)
How pray tell is The Happening worse? While Taking Lives encourages their actors to act, The Happening feels as if each performance was filmed on a separate sound stage and then cut together in post-production. Likewise, Mark Wahlberg regresses from whatever acting talent he won in a fiddle-playing contest with the devil to garner an Oscar nomination in The Departed. His furrowed brow, arched eyebrows and flaring nostrils make it feel as if he were delivering his lines amidst constipation. That aside, the story is silly—nature rebels and releases neurotoxins that turn us into suicidal automatons. I’m fine with nature rebelling; Hitchcock did it well in The Birds, but Shyamalan is not Hitchcock. Even if some of Hitchcock’s endeavors—like The Birds—contain a silly premise, he managed to coax solid performances from his performers while creating suspense. We didn’t want to see Tippie Hedron get her eyes pecked out, and when she did, it was shocking. There is no suspense in The Happening; instead, there’s a bunch of exposition—about nothing.
The premise is predicated on the fact that no one knows what is happening or why it’s happening, just that it is happening. And good thing it happens or else Elliot and Alma Moore (Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) won’t rekindle the love that was suffocated in their marriage. I think this is what irks me the most: the film isn’t sure what it’s trying to do—and it doesn’t succeed in any attempt.
Is The Happening trying to send a message about the insignificance of humans in the perpetually evolving natural world?
Elliot Moore: Come on, buddy. Take an interest in science. What could be the reason bees have vanished?
Jake: [after a long pause] An act of nature, and we’ll never fully understand it.
Elliot Moore: Nice answer, Jake. He’s right. Science will come up with some reason to put in the books, but in the end it’ll be just a theory. I mean, we will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding. To be a scientist, you must have a respectful awe for the laws of nature.
First, what teacher says “Buddy” without raising a red flag that has an arrow through the heart of a pederast embroidered on it? Second, thank god for the existential kid. Third, it’s awfully curious that Elliot, a science teacher, confirms that his profession is built on a frozen pile of horseshit just waiting to thaw (laws of nature).
Or, is this film re-fashioning a romance impelled by accepting one’s mortality. Is there a reason why Elliot and Alma coincidentally decide to exit their respective safe havens precisely as the neurotoxins seem to vanish from the air, leaving them alive, well, and on a train back to Philadelphia? Also, is there a reason why the separated couple is able to communicate through one hundred feet of two-inch diameter pipe that is buried underground and stretches between the house that shelters Alma and the shed that shelters Elliot? Finally, there seems to be no reason for any character to talk except to directly exposit a story that Shyamalan is unable to tell through technique:
Jared: Got kids?
Elliot Moore: No.
Jared: How come? You got… a problem?
Elliot Moore: No. She wanted to wait.
Jared: Really? For what?
Elliot Moore: For me to grow up. Why are we talking about this?
Evidently, not progenitizing is a sexual issue, not a choice.
Also, why are they talking about this? Who is Jared? Well, he’s the guy who has a small scene to explain to us that Elliot has a problem and needs to grow up. Thank God for Jared!
I’ll admit that there are a number of films that have been worse in regard to quality or production: Repo: The Genetic Opera, The Hottie and the Nottie, I Know Who Killed Me, Freddy Got Fingered, Battlefield Earth, and Catwoman. But of these films, two star Paris Hilton, one has Lindsay Lohan, no one has ever taken Tom Green seriously, one is based on an L. Ron Hubbard novel, and the last stars Halle Berry covered in latex, which incidentally has been a staple on AMC over the last two years, so time will tell on the merits of Catwoman— just like Krush Groove. The difference between this band of filmic pariahs and The Happening is that none of the former tried to take themselves seriously. The same can’t be said for The Happening.
