Bad Behavior
People act really weirdly in ‘The Happening’ and ‘Quid Pro Quo’
By Andy Klein
The good news is: M. Night Shyamalan is back on the upswing with his new The Happening. The bad news is: After Lady in the Water, what wouldn’t represent an upswing? That is to say, The Happening is nowhere near the level of his breakthrough, The Sixth Sense, and not quite as good as the subsequent Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, but at least it suggests that the awfulness of Lady in the Water may have been an aberration.
The opening credits are superimposed on a sky filled with beautiful time-lapse clouds that, along with the music, darken ominously, foreshadowing events to come. In Central Park, a young woman goes all glassy-eyed ... before killing herself. Within minutes, Manhattan is in the grip of a veritable epidemic of suicides. No one knows what the hell is going on.
As word spreads to other cities, Philadelphia science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) gathers up wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and leaves the city – just to play it safe – with pal Julian (John Leguizamo) and the latter’s eight-year-old daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). But, even out in the countryside, the mysterious suicide plague seems to be taking hold, and the four find themselves on the run. Soon Julian becomes separated from the others, leaving Jess and the childless Moores as a sort of cobbled-together family.
It’s always been difficult to write about Shyamalan’s films without spoiling the big “twist,” but The Happening is different. The story is only partly driven by the characters (and the audience) wanting to know why this is happening. Is it terrorists? A government experiment gone awry? An effect of global warming?
The characters do a lot of speculating, and the correct answer (though it’s not confirmed for a while) is suggested pretty early on during some strikingly on-the-nose exposition – which means that the only remaining revelation involves the precise dynamics of the affliction and how to avoid it. In other words, this represents a change of pace for Shyamalan; with no shocking twist, The Happening is really a pretty straightforward horror film.
In fact, it follows the template of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds very closely. There is the sudden appearance of an unstoppable menace of apocalyptic proportions, possibly a sort of supernatural expression of the natural. Driven by confusion and despair, the escapees come together as a surrogate family, with Wahlberg, Deschanel, and Sanchez standing in for Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and Veronica Cartwright. (Betty Buckley shows up in a different version of Jessica Tandy’s “old lady” character.) Even the ending has similarities, although Shyamalan nails down things that Hitchcock left up in the air.
The big difference is – no birds. That’s not just a wisecrack: Shyamalan has made the approach of the menace almost invisible, which has the potential to be even scarier than a marauding murder of crows.
It really isn’t as frightening as its model – or Steven Spielberg’s much-maligned War of the Worlds, which follows a similar trajectory – but it does maintain a generally high tension level. Throughout most of his decline, Shyamalan has remained a terrifically talented director. The Village may be ridiculous, but it has some beautifully put together sequences. (Sadly, Lady in the Water lacks even that.)
The phrase “one-trick pony” gets invoked in this context sometimes, but it’s not really fair. Sure, The Sixth Sense remains his greatest accomplishment, but that’s the consequence of starting out with a brilliant piece of work. (Yes, he made two interesting, smaller features before that, but Sixth Sense was his big coming out.) It’s Shyamalan the writer who has been failing Shyamalan the director; Sixth Sense was a terrific realization of an equally terrific hook. Since then, it’s the scripts – primarily the premises – that have gone downhill, not Shyamalan’s staging.
Even here, there are some script problems. The “rules” of the menace don’t seem wholly consistent. An early scene of construction workers dropping en masse from a building provided a great shot for the trailer and ads, but it doesn’t really conform to what we’re later led to believe. We get no explanation for – or even acknowledgment of – several cases where one person in the middle of an infected crowd seems unaffected by the mysterious force. Immune? Simply slower on the uptake? Who knows? At one early point, we’re told that the mechanism involves the blocking of our survival instincts – which tells us almost nothing about why people would be compelled to kill themselves.
Another, more modest film opening this week deals with equally strange behavior. In Carlos Brooks’s Quid Pro Quo, Nick Stahl plays Isaac Knott, a public radio storyteller – in the mode of the Robin Williams character in The Night Listener – who has been paralyzed from the waist down since a car accident in his childhood. He receives some tips from the pseudonymous “Ancient Chinese Girl” about a subculture of “able-bodied” people who want to be wheelchair-bound or want to become amputees.
His informant turns out to be art restorer Fiona (Vera Farmiga), whose physical beauty is undercut by a disturbingly nervous affect. Soon Fiona admits that she is one of these “wannabes”; predictably romance blooms between these two, each of whom is envious of the other’s abilities or disabilities. To say much more would be to give away some genuine surprises.
On the surface, this sounds like a replay of David Cronenberg’s deeply icky Crash (1996) – about people who got a sexual buzz from their own disfigurement – but it’s more concerned with conventional narrative than with wallowing in the grotesquerie of the subculture.
When Fiona tells Isaac, “I’m already paralyzed; I’m just trapped in a walking person’s body,” I thought the film might be a metaphor for more familiar gender identification conflicts, because – come on! – surely nobody actually yearns to be physically disadvantaged. But, if the Internet has taught me one thing, it’s that there are no fictional psychological kinks: Anything a writer could come up with, no matter how baroque and outrageous, exists out there somewhere. And so it appears that there really is a condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), which Quid Pro Quo describes quite accurately.
Brooks’s plot might be criticized as a little pat – so neatly constructed as to seem artificial. But he makes no pretense otherwise. Very deftly made, with some lovely cinematography and two quirky, engaging lead performances, it’s a satisfying debut.
The Happening. Written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. With Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez, and Betty Buckley. Opens Friday citywide.
Quid Pro Quo. Written and directed by Carlos Brooks. With Nick Stahl, Vera Farmiga, James Frain, and Kate Burton. At the Landmark West Los Angeles and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.
Published: 06/12/2008
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