ShadowDance

Halfway through “The Happening,”as the movie began to splutter, I realized what M. Night Shyamalan needs more than anything else. He needs Val Lewton. To anyone toiling in genre movies during the Second World War, Lewton was a godsend: a fixer, a fabled storyteller, and the kind of guy who gives producers a good name and stops directors from getting a bad one. Born in Yalta, he wound up as the head of horror—now there’s one for the résumé—at R.K.O. in 1942, where he produced films such as “The Ghost Ship,” “The Body Snatcher,” “Cat People,” and the unambiguously titled “I Walked with a Zombie.” The last two were directed by the energetic Jacques Tourneur, but even with lesser talents Lewton proved himself the nonpareil of atmosphere and zip. Too much of the first, as he saw, and the tale clogs up; too much of the second, and you leave the horror behind.

If Shyamalan’s need for such guidance seems more urgent than ever, it may be because “The Happening” is an eco-drama, and that, I regret to say, is a contradiction in terms. Environmental catastrophe is a clear and present danger, but, if you’re a head-scratching screenwriter, it’s not a patch on the Red Menace. To be fair, for the first twenty minutes Shyamalan finds a regular rhythm of shock: people in Central Park, and then in the surrounding blocks, start to halt in their tracks, like robots on strike, and take their own lives with whatever comes to hand—a firearm, a high building, a prong being used as a hair clip. As the story spreads, and the action moves from New York to Philadelphia, from town to countryside, and from crowd to gaggle, we slowly realize that greenery has gone toxic: trees, grass, and plants are wafting death into our brains.

The response to Shyamalan’s film has been almost shrublike in its venom, and there is no denying that his ear for dialogue appears to be overgrown with moss. The performances, too, are weirdly stunted: normally reliable actors like Mark Wahlberg, John Leguizamo, and Zooey Deschanel—playing, respectively, a science teacher, a math teacher, and a worried wife, all fleeing the leafy threat—stalk through the action with a mixture of grimaces, goofiness, and what I charitably read as indigestion rather than catatonia. To be honest, I would be perfectly happy to walk with a zombie after ninety minutes of this; it would feel like light relief. Nevertheless, movies every bit as stumbling as “The Happening,” and far more savage, come out every month, and few are greeted with such contempt. Why should this be?

My suspicion is that Shyamalan, despite everything, still gets under people’s skin, and that their mockery is a way of saying it ain’t so. He is plainly obsessive—that is not just the source of his appeal but the prelude to his follies—and we are made uneasy and embarrassed by obsession. (The same problem arises in Michael Powell films.) I have always taken Shyamalan to be a fearmonger, but the new film suggests that he may be, at heart, a morbidologist: he is trying to reinsert the fear of death into a moviegoing culture that would prefer to think of it as laughable, dismissible, or gross. People around me in the cinema were cackling at some of the suicides in “The Happening,” but self-annihilation, and the host of motives that can spur us toward it, is no joke. Those who punish a filmmaker for the crime of humorlessness are the same audiences who go tense and quiet on the rare occasions when, as Shyamalan did in “The Sixth Sense,” he makes sombre and controlled use of the same anxieties. “The Happening” is an awful letdown, yet it leaves you with something new, as a gently waving tree—that classical image of pastoral tranquillity—mutates into a harbinger of doom. It’s the first time I’ve seen that, and I guess it won’t be the last. ♦

Trip wrote:Е, що, сигурно пак щеше да ти хареса, като всичко останало

Trip wrote:Е, що, сигурно пак щеше да ти хареса, като всичко останало