MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

The Happening Rated R

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.  Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel.

Photo © 20th Century Fox
Movie Review by Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

Nothing is quite as disappointing as a clever premise poorly served.  Such is the case with The Happening, a film that ponders what might happen if a fatal pandemic broke out in New York City.  Told from the viewpoint of a young couple who are also in the midst of some marital strife, the film unfolds in a naturalistic way, following their exodus from the city into the Pennsylvania countryside, along with a couple of hundred other evacuees.  Various theories for the catastrophe are shared, with the primary explanation offered about 30 minutes into the film.  Since everything that follows pretty much concurs with that theory, there’s not much suspense to come.  Writer-director Shyamalan has mastered a low-key, quiet creepiness (at its best in his second feature, 1999’s The Sixth Sense) that doesn’t quite match the urban landscape at the film’s start.  I cannot fathom New Yorkers calmly walking to the trains that will take them out of the city.  (Thousands of residents + limited rail transport = widespread panic!)  Once the film switches to the countryside, things improve, but the film’s ending is corny and at cross purposes with the overall tone of the movie.  The Happening evokes aspects of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds and 1959’s On the Beach, both superior entertainments.  The film is provocative enough to be worth a rental in a few months, but if you want a movie worth your ten bucks at the box office, it just ain’t happenin’

Pitchfork Rating: Three halos. (A provocative doomsday scenario that suggests that Planet Earth may just be about ready to wipe out the human species; the film is earnest but also profoundly underwhelming.)   Three pitchforks. (For stark and shocking acts of violence that are relentless, while somewhat discreetly conveyed.)

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