Jun. 12 - What Happens in The Happening
Average Joe Joe McMuscles (Mark Wahlberg) has a boring and awkward divorce with wife of 4 months Jane SleepySlowTalker (Zooey Deschanel). Their conversations are marked with lots of long pauses and vague inklings of times past, possibly involving a devastating miscarriage or the passing of a beloved hamster.
As the estranged couple tries to get through their personal conflicts, strange and unexplained happenings occur. These events (which happen) start off as occurring strangely, possibly will a lot of stuff and things transpiring. Eventually these results will get more serious, and these happenings happen to get more insidious and, yes, deadly. But the characters and audience still won't have the foggiest clue what these occurrences, happenings, and events all add up to. At least not until the end of the second act.
Despite the complete disinterest of the audience, The Happening constantly flashes back to happenings during Joe and Jane's marriage (thus paralleling the happenings in the present). M. Night Shyamalan shows up in one or all of these flashbacks as Al Truistic, their selfless marriage counselor who does everything in his professional and personal capacity to keep the marriage on track. Or he might be the couple's mutual lawyer friend Phil Anthropic, who finds himself constantly and selflessly caught in the middle of their marital bickering and divorce drama.
The writer/director/hero of the film.
When the film gets to the end of the second act, it happens that the happenings are happening because of (SPOILER! THIS IS APPARENTLY WHAT HAPPENS TO HAPPEN IN THE HAPPENING) deadly neurotoxins in plants. This twist is met by every theater in America uniting in a collective and thunderous groan. Parents sneak out so they don't have to pay extra to the babysitter, teenagers trudge over to the neighboring screen to see Iron Man for the 4th time, and a big fat drunk guy in the front row explodes with an "AW COME ON NOW."
Leaked screenshot from The Happening.
Despite the audience's objections, Shyamalan continues with this deadly plant theme, using it as a very thin allegory for global warming and man's selfish raping of the earth (with a little 9/11 thrown in). Just in case the audience doesn't understand the parallels, there is a short bit of dialogue in which Joe and Jane spell out the purpose of the movie:
Jane: Why is this occurrence happening to us? Why did the plants plan this event that is happening?
Joe: It looks like mother nature is finally fighting back. Fighting back because of global warming. God we suck.
At this point, Sam SecondaryCharacter (John Leguizamo) kills himself. Joe and Jane are sad, but after about 3 minutes they forget about him entirely. By the end, when Joe and Jane have their backs against the wall, with deadly neurotoxins looming nearby, they discover something completely mundane and retarded that can kill the plants. This could be anything, like cold weather, lack of sunlight, Dutch elm disease, or maybe a garden hoe with "DEUS EX MACHINA" carved into the side. It doesn't matter what it happens to be, but it saves everyone from the happenings, and finally puts mother nature in its proper motherfucking place.
Through all these horrible happenings, Joe and Jane learn something about God's wrath and, of course, themselves. Joe grabs Jane's hand as they walk toward the sunset, their marriage anew in the wake of billions of suicide deaths and the destruction of all plants on earth.
(Remember to stay after the credits, folks! There is a short scene in which the camera dollies in on a patch of dirt, where a tiny sprout emerges. The music crescendos, it cuts to black and displays a haunting "TO BE CONTINUED?!")
Posted by Nick Nobel
