The Happening
I don’t rather like plants. They make my allergies and asthma act up, shroud my yard with pinecones like spikey turds, and cover my car in pollen. Screw plants.
Turns out, plants don’t rather like me either.
That’s the premise of The Happening, the one horror movie with the balls to uncover the coniferous conspiracy between trees, grass and wind that is so unshocking you’ll want to jump through the TV and into another movie, even another Shyamalan Shlocker. This movie gets a lot of crap, but I love it. If this move was a human being it would be a misbegotten mongoloid child, so retarded and ill-conceived it should be kept away from sharp objects lest it cut itself to see what blood looks like. Yet it’s all the more adorable for that reason. You want to cradle the DVD in your arms and protect it from plastic butter knives and Velcro shoe-laces. Despite its flaws- as countless as the stars it miraculously casted- it’s an endearing, fascinating film worth much more than the 5 dollars I spent on it.
The plot of The Happening is simple: plants are fed up, the final straw being pollution or climate change or some such eco-environmentalist issue only plants would care about, so they evolve deadly pollen that makes people kill themselves.
How?
The pollen disables your will to survive (I’ll get to that later), creating a death wish more enthusiastic than if Charles Bronson found himself in the brawl at the end of The Outsiders. Once they lose their will to live, the infected don’t sit around reading existentialism, muttering “Life is a meaningless sham.” Oh no. These people really, really want to die, and they go way out their way to do it, often with the most implausible means. One would think that once a person had decided to die, they would at least choose the most painless, if not quickest, way to do this.
Nope. Not in this Happy-Go-Happenin’!
The first death, a woman in Central Park, stabs herself in the neck with a nine inch hair nail in a such a nonchalant manner she might as well say “Well I’ve had enough of life. No need to be dramatic about this or anything. Dying is so boring.” Before she does this, she asks her uninfected friend where she was in her book with the tell-tale vapid look of baffled apathy the infected get shortly before they die. This look contradicts the dedication to death and complete indifference to pain these people display in their last moments.
Shortly after, some construction workers joking about big penises are interrupted by an accident. One of the workers, Jose I think, is on the and roof found the joke sophomoric and bad and decided to come down and tongue lash them. He gets pollenated and realizes a mere forty foot drop is no obstacle for his indignation, so he jumps to a mangled death I find much more hilarious than big penises. I’m saddened Jose died, as he was a very developed character and was very important to the plot, if only he had lived to see it. Jose must have been quite popular too, because his coworkers on the roof cannot cope with his departure, self-pollenate and drop from the sky like The Boy Who Thought He Could Fly.
Before I go on, I should mention that this review will be pretty dark.
There’s a particular death scene I want to discuss, although I don’t remember when it occurs. A policeman shoots himself with his side-arm. Then his gun gets passed from infected to infected, each politely waiting for their turn in this game of Polish Roulette, leaving the last person to pistol whip himself when the gun runs out of merry-go-rounds. (I normally think Polish jokes in bad taste, but with The Happening, anything goes.)
Next we meet our protagonist, Mark Wahlberg, a science teacher who is perplexed with bee disappearances science can’t explain (probably because science doesn’t care). Soon word of Jose’s untimely death hits the news cycle, and the principal, a close and oftentimes side-line sweetie of his, comes to break the news to Wahlberg. Wahlberg is distraught and heartbroken, so heartbroken in fact that he spends the rest of the movie bewildered over who the hell Jose was and how he was “happenened” to death. Seriously, he looks like he’s getting motion sickness from the receding plot line and will eventually lose his will to live through the unendurable shame of being in this movie, plants and their Doctor Crane pollen be damned.
The teachers all get together and have a conference on Jose, who it turns out was a casualty in a terrorist attack so horrific only a Mastermind from a Non-Shyamalan movie could be behind it. Apparently Dr. Evil armed himself with a suicide-inducing gas, got himself a Golden Ticket from Last Action Hero and hopped into The Happening. The teachers close the school, giving Wahlberg the freedom to take the plot home and subcontract Zoe Deschanel into a subplot he can deal with.
Wahlberg thinks about warning his students, doesn’t, and then talks with John Leguizamo, his best friend. Leguizamo is a math teacher and he’s freaked the hell out, eventually parting ways with Wahlberg and winding up in the thick of an attack, where he fights the pollen the only way he can: with a math problem. He dies.
Wahlberg then goes home to Zoe Deschanel, who spends most of the first act texting or talking on the phone. I’m sure this was a concession in her contract. “Sure, I’ll do your stupid movie about murderous trees, but I get to use my phone to entertain myself when I don’t have any lines.” Deschanel went out with guy who calls and texts so much you really want him to stop and smell the daises and get infected. These texts give Zoe a look of such utter confusion it’s as if the shadowy figure she dated was secretly the Riddler, blowing her mind with riddle after riddle like a troll on a bridge. “What IS my favorite color?”
The Wahlbergs go to a train station where Leguizamo gives Deschanel some lip and leaves. Leguizamo doesn’t like Deschanel because he caught her crying before she married Wahlberg, thus revealing that she’s not a jumper. I thought this was foreshadowing a scene where Wahlberg will have to negotiate an infected Deschanel from jumping from the roof of a two story house.
I was sadly wrong.
The train is derailed by exposition the conductors aren’t interested enough to expose, causing Wahlberg’s perplexity to double down on itself and eliminate all hope of a serious performance. At some point everyone decides to leave, and particularly without Wahlberg and Deschanel. Leguizamo uses the last of his Super Mario Brothers clout to hitch a ride with Dante from Clerks. “Are you really gonna let Luigi die man?” Off to find his wife, who may or may not be dead, he leaves his daughter with Wahlberg and Deschanel.
Leguizamo sure picked the wrong ride, as Dante gets infected and realizes Kaitlin knew it was a dead guy in the bathroom all along, and worse, that the only way to get her back is to die himself. But Dante’s not getting off the pot without first giving the plants a little shit, so he kamikazies into a nearby tree, regrettably without first screaming “BONZAI!” There’s an odd thing about this scene. If you watch closely, Dante and another man who’s clearly not Leguizamo go through the windshield. I know it’s not Leguizamo because he gets out and slashes his wrists. Leguizamo, however, was sitting in the passenger’s seat, so this means the man in the back must have zigzagged on impact like a magic bullet before going through the windshield.
Wahlberg and Deshanel match up with a hippie gardener who happens to know what’s happening with the happening. Plants. They can talk to each other, and want to kill us. It will take Wahlberg into the third act to piece this together, but the hippie’s basically right.
They run into Gomer Pyle at a crossroads, who tells them everyone at his military base is dead. That would be a scene. Imagine so many suicidal soldiers, on a military base with bombs, grenades, automatic weapons and God-knows-what-else, infected with this Heinous Death toxin. I’m sure it was a grisly sight: people swallowing grenades in a last minute homage to Tex Avery; a tanker running over his crew like cars at a Monster Truck Rally before turning the cannon on himself.... you get the idea.
WHY DIDN”T THAT SCENE HAPPEN!
They head into a pasture. Here a woman talks with her daughter in Princeton, which is where Leguizamo was headed before he got sucked into a Warp Zone from which he’ll never return. This alerts Wahlberg, who asks if there’s been an attack there. The girl responds with “everyone outside is dead”, and a full thirty seconds later, after the mother has moved on to other topics, Wahlberg, still stuck on stupid, blurts out: “Everyone’s dead?” Yes, Mark. If you can’t keep up with the conversation, go sit at the kiddie table with Zoe and sort out the marriage you never should have had.
The daughter on the phone gets infected, which causes her to “see Calculus” and throw herself out the window to catch it. At some point the group splits up, one half- the half conveniently with Gomer- gets infected, and after a short speech by Gomer about loving his gun, begin to cap themselves in intervals specifically designed to fill the gaps in Wahlberg’s dialogue. Pleas are made for Wahlberg to fight toxin with science, which, scientifically, was a bad idea.
After that, Wahlberg learns that singing the Doobie brothers off key will make holed-up missing links from The Hills Have Eyes Daisy Chain blow teenagers apart with shotguns. He’s trying to prove he’s not infected so the hicks will let him inside, the very act of trying to get inside and away from the pollen proof enough.
Eventually Wahlberg, Deschanel and the girl find an old woman who must have read the DSM IV as a self-help book, obsessed with her lemon drink and Victorian table manners. She has a collection of dolls so creepish and vulgar Charles Lee Ray would be afraid to be reincarnated in one, which are the only half-ass scary thing in the movie. Wahlberg and Co. spend the night, and I get to my favorite scene.
The old woman goes outside in the morning, and the plants take pity on the many shades of Technicolor crazy possessing her, so they infect her with a little crazy of their own. This old woman’s suicide... well... it makes The Virgin Suicides look lazy and uninspired. Wahlberg goes into the living room, where a loud thump hits the wall so hard a painting is almost knocked off. Grandma was apparently trying to Robocop her way back inside so she could put some cyanide in her lemon drink. Next, she walks to a window, waits for the camera to catch up, then throws her face through it with all the Geritol powered gusto a geriatric can muster. This doesn’t work, so she repeats, this time with the camera panned out and only showing her gray-haired scalp slam into the counter as the secret to her lemonade recipe is lost forever.
Eventually the Happening stops at a precise time never explained. There’s some news footage about another Happening, which starts up in the film’s final scenes. No suicide is shown, but by this time you lungs ache and your throat is so sore you don’t care.
One of the worst flaws in The Happening is its simplistic view of psychology. The toxin doesn’t so much erase a metaphysical will to survive as it replaces it with a Will to Die in The Most Gruesome Way within My Immediate Vicinity. There’s a man who feeds himself to some lions he has to encourage to do so by offering them his arms. Another man cranks up an industrial lawn mower or tractor plough and lies down in its path. It’s as if these people are thinking: “Well, one death’s as good as another. Here’s a spoon. I’m going to commit seppuku so hardcore a Samurai would blush.”
Which brings me to another flaw. The gruesome suicide device is sadly under-exploited. Imagine a scene like Pulp Fiction, where a man in a garage is infected and goes through a series of weapons before ultimately deciding on the most impractical and nonlethal gadget he can get his hands on. Imagine a housewife getting a dose while reading The Bell Jar which allows her to finally make enough sense of it to stick her head in an oven while chanting “I am the Walrus.” None of these possibilities are too whacky for The Happening to handle.
What if someone in a group got infected, and like in a zombie movie, is kept around in hopes of a cure? He constantly tries to kill himself in increasingly creative and unforeseen ways, leading the group to tie him up like Ulysses and put him in an automated wheelchair he runs into trees and rolls down steep hills shouting “As you wish!” He eventually dies at the hands of a Rube Goldberg device they come upon at Dr. Kevorkian’s house designed exclusively for a person hand-cuffed and hog-tied by his own peers for his own good.
This is why I think there should be sequel, The Happening: It’s Happening Again. I’d go see it. In any case, this movie has inspired me to get a bumper sticker that will read “WARNING: In case of a HAPPENING, this car will mow down power line poles until it runs out of gas.”
Was M. Night Shyamalan serious when he made this, or was he really trying to make a B movie? No one but him knows for sure. I say, it doesn’t matter. God bless him either way.