by Art Skimpole

Created on: July 09, 2008

If "The Happening" is serious, it is a shame. If it is not, then it is a crime. M. Night Shyamalan's cinematic ouvre features a number of intriguing films, though he seems to be running on a steadily dwindling supply of creative fuel. "The Sixth Sense" featured an interesting premise which, although far from being original in the strictest sense (James' "The Turn of the Screw," for example, explored the same macabre, supernatural territory with riveting results) yielded genuine empathy for the protagonist and a jolt of surprise when his actual status as one of the departed souls who could be seen and communicated with by a small boy was revealed. "Unbreakable" is a very potent study of the psychology of the survivor of trauma and "Signs" was, despite the scenery-chewing zeal of Mel Gibson, a fine treatment of the perils of smug skepticism in the face of something genuinely otherworldly. "The Village," though it ended in an eminently predictable, formulaic fashion, was a thinly disguised allegorical polemic, an argument against paranoia and conservative mania for the abiding stability and purity of a cultural island in a sea of decadence. "The Village" marks a turn toward parable and fairy tale that culminated in "The Lady in the Water," which was, while somewhat sophomoric, still an effective case-in allegorical terms once again-for the courage to believe in the power of the imagination and the alchemy wrought upon a mediocre man by extraordinary challenges. Shyamalan is (or was) a director who believes in the power of narrative insofar as he is obviously eager to, in the words of Emily Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," such that the seemingly silly flight of fancy on the screen, if it is sifted with subtlety, can yield a more substantive story still.

What is going on in "The Happening," then, cannot really be judged according to historical precedent, save for a single scene in the film that might rescue it from oblivion. The scene in question involves the principal character-played so badly by Mark Wahlberg that one is tempted to assume that he is looking for laughs rather than gasps of dismay-and his band of fellow fugitives from a deadly plague of suicide-inducing toxins that are emitted by the local flora in order to decimate the population of human "pests," stumbling into a show home in which everything is a plastic simulacrum. The orange juice in the refrigerator, the sushi and shiraz on the dining room table, everything is fake. One character

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