Apparently it’s awards season but considering the average runtime of this year’s nominees is about 2.5 hours, I’m just going to have to march on like they’re not happening. Or maybe I’ll put up a special post during the Oscars written from my couch while I wear my nicest pair of sweatpants? Either way, I’ll continue to be your source for short runtime magic so why not hit that fun button below and subscribe?
I did something stupid. In the excitement for my John-uary Leguizamo retrospective, I put a movie on my list I shouldn’t have. I had heard things. I had seen things. But I didn’t know those things. Now I have a deep understanding of the cumbersome curiosity that is M. Night Shyamalan's 2008 smash hit flop, The Happening (91 minutes). It’s remarkable to me that anyone involved in this film still has a career but we have to appreciate their resilience, don’t we?
The Happening was a part of the great M. Night Letdown of the mid-2000s. The reception of his films steadily declined from its peak (1999’s The Sixth Sense) to something middling (2004’s The Village) to this atrocity I am writing about today. It stars Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore, a high school science teacher, and Zooey Deschanel as his detached wife Alma. When a mysterious outbreak causes people to start killing themselves, the Moores flee Philadelphia with Elliot’s best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) in hopes of outrunning it. But in just a few hours the contaminant (what it is exactly they don’t know) catches up to them and more and more people die. Could it be, Elliot starts to wonder, that it’s the plants doing this?
There are a lot of pieces written about this movie and why it’s secretly good or about how Mark Wahlberg famously said it was his worst film: “…Fuck it. It is what it is. Fucking trees, man. The plants. Fuck it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.”
But for me, I have a hard time standing too firmly in either camp because the movie is simply a bit boring. I think it’s well known by now that I love a gloriously bad movie and there are some seriously bad movies that happen to be favorites of mine, but The Happening isn’t nearly self aware enough for that distinction. It is taking itself too seriously and even when there are moments when it feels like Wahlberg is going to break through the stilted surface and give us a wink, he’s held back, contained. No winks. The man’s a peacock, Shymalan! You gotta let him fly!
Shymalan has admitted that he was all over the map tonally saying, “The key to The Blob is that it just never takes itself that seriously. I think I was inconsistent.” Since the movie’s release he has begged us to believe that he was attempting to recreate the vibe of a B-movie but a lot of people on the internet speculate if that is just him covering his ass because it is hard to believe, even for him, that he could get it so wrong. The movie is very serious in tone but the content is so unserious. The plants are emitting a neurotoxin that is making everyone kill themselves in the most horrific way possible? Pump that up, let’s go bigger! But we never do. We coast pretty neutrally all the way to the end of the movie. We even miss out on the great “Shyamalan twist” in this movie because the notion of the plants as threats is planted early on and grows as the movie progresses.
Both Wahlberg and Deschanel were picked apart for their performances. And they are bad performances, but I always find myself thinking it’s because our visionary is just off screen making weird choices. I mean, accepting these two as your leads from the casting table is the wrong choice to begin with. There’s little chemistry, little believability. Though they play a couple going through a rough patch, I find it hard to believe that they ever had chemistry. I have to wonder what kind of relationships Shyamalan has been in because his idea of what makes a marriage work (or not work) is pretty baffling.
The script is sticky, too. It follows the proper beats of a horror-thriller but forgets that for suspense we have to care about the stakes. Somehow we have the greatest stakes there could be (the end of the human race) but I found myself not caring at all. If this wasn’t made in 2008 I’d believe this was written by AI. Perhaps in one of the more well known moments of this movie, a woman calls her lemonade a “lemon drink”. The whole thing is a bit uncanny.
Except when it comes to our guy, Leguizamo, who escaped this film with just a few scratches. Where Wahlberg and Deschanel were roasted, Leguizamo cooly coasted away.
Sure, he’s not a lead, but he is the only other recognizable name (at the time) in the film. And his performance is perhaps at the heart of why I’m dedicating a month to him. He truly seems able to work with whatever is handed to him. He makes lines about math problems so engaging and believable while Wahlberg is serving up, well, this. “What? No.”
Leguizamo has a knack for finding the core of his character and locking into it. Even when Julian decides the best thing to do is leave his daughter with the dysfunctional Moores and drive directly into the toxin to find his likely dead wife, I kind of almost respected his decision. I think we can all agree no mother would ever want their daughter left alone in a crisis… But I almost let it get me. In a movie where very little happens, his emotional decision is a beam of light in a dark room. There’s feeling there. And in a movie devoid of human emotion, that’s impressive.
I wonder if this movie would grow on me with more rewatches and if I watched it with a group of friends versus alone. It definitely lends itself to a Mystery Science Theater type experience, is that how people enjoy this? Let me know in the comments.
The peacock scene plug did not go unnoticed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark is that eccentric outside of acting.
I think I would recommend never watching this movie ever again 😁. If you invited friends to watch it with you they might stop being your friends! 😆
I was a big fan of Shyamalan with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. I even thought Signs and The Village were decent with creepy moments. However this and The Lady in the Water were absolute stinkers. If you take those two and then follow them with After Earth, he’s done well to get his career back on track!