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This one’s for ‘The Birds’, Hitchcock’s Daphne Du Maurier adaptation about a svelte blonde terrifically essayed by the director’s muse and sometime tempestuous obsession Tippi Hedren who visits a small sealocked town which suddenly finds itself under siege from the local birds who inexplicably go on a blind and murderous rampage. Under its apocalyptic nature’s fury plot and genre shocks Hitchcock plumbs deep into the female psyche, tense claustrophobic relationships and drew from Freud to lay a sharp context of jealousy, personal conflict and an individual under siege from outward forces that one cannot explain.

So, how Hitchcockian is M. Night Shyamalan, purportedly the Hitchcock of the generation and how much is pure PR drivel? Genre revisionists, unashamedly manipulative, self-styled auteurs who operate in the mainstream, inclined to cameos in their own films, egoists, brandnames… end of comparison. Where Hitchcock delights in subverting middle-class values and exploring the concealed or dormant repression and depravity, Shyamalan is absolute kitchen-sink. Hitchcockian characters are creatures of strange obsessions, kinks and with oodles of classic Hollywood charm while Shyamalan drains his characters of all gloss and they mostly lead dull uninteresting ordinary lives rife with middle-class suburban conflicts. In a Hitchcock film a divorce would be a psychosexual passion play perhaps even international intrigue while for Shyamalan it’s an inevitable coming of a depressive stasis in a relationship.

To end all comparisons for good, to separate fact from PR comes ‘The Happening’, Shyamalan’s latest which takes a the apocalyptic-nature’s-fury premise of ‘The Birds’ crossed with ‘Day of the Triffids’ and because it’s Shyamalan, he has to stick in an overwrought relationship drama and this time around it’s even flimsier than the usual ‘Kramer vs Kramer’ shtick and then there’s the worst part of the scheme… something that’s afflicted his films since ‘Signs’… I’m not talking about the famed even forced twist endings… what really gets the goat is the pseudo-spiritual-hope-reigns-where-love-reigns-philosophy that masquerades as the key to life and its damn mysteries. I manage to enjoy ‘Love Actually’, I’ve sat through ‘Music & Lyrics’, I’ve endured ‘13 going ion 30′ but the drama queen manner in which Shyamalan delivers his message reminds you of one of those anonymous stories that appear in self-help tomes, religious weeklies and a million lame pass-this-on-to-five-friends-or-you-incur-enternal-damnation internet forwards - My wife walked out on me and I stood in front of God and asked Him,”WHY?” when the Lord smiled beatifically and just then the door bell rang and outside in blinding light of the sun stood a full bodied Russian masseuse who told me her name was Maria and I realized that the whole universe was impermanent and that the Lord redeems and that happiness and sadness are as fleeting as a passing cloud and what difference a full bodied woman can have on your general disposition.

Some claim it was mere posing but Hitchcock set his sights on ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ while Shyamalan seems more overawed by ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’.

‘The Happening’ begins with promise. After revising the spooky child horror, the reluctant superhero, the extra-terrestrial invasion, the creature feature and the fantasy primers, Shyamalan sets his sights on the apocalypse. It makes its appearance disconcertingly. Central Park comes to a literal standstill and as if seized by some unseen destructive force people begin to kill themselves. Shyamalan ups the body count and blood lust and as lensed by Tak Fujimoto and deviously scored by regular John Newton Howard there is a morbid poetry to these dazed and confused suicides. This unknown syndrome begins to spread first through the whole of New York and then further inland and its mysterious nature leads to wild speculation- terrorist attack, government research gone wrong, natural calamity- without any clear explanation, let alone a cure. The beginning of this event also coincides with Alma (Zooey Deschanel) getting a call from some Joey (Shyamalan’s cameo as a voice on the phone) with whom she had Tiramisu the day before and now is developing an infatuation for. And before you wonder why ‘Tiramisu’, let me just tell you that a great big deal is made of it throughout the film and though I wasn’t clued in, it might even have some metaphorical value. Tiramisu as metaphor… like in some Reader’s Digest story, as in ‘I baked him some Tiramisu the day he succumbed to his rare chronic heart disease’.

I can’t help but wonder what was Shyamalan thinking? Dessert or The End of The World.

Madame Alma has fallen out of love with her husband, well loved high school science teacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg). He is as genial as they come and still believes in the marriage while she just wants out. What follows is classic on-the-run-from-the-apocalypse as the couple rediscover themselves and their love for each other. Shyamalan ambitiously tries to channel a ‘The Birds’-like subtext but where Hitchcock was relentless in manipulating shock and fear to an existential dread Shyamalan’s grand narrative loses itself in inane spools. It’s obvious that the titular ‘Happening’ stands for both the nameless apocalypse that is playing out and the new and disruptive friction between husband and wife on account of the Tiramisu rendezvous.

Shyamalan himself trivializes the movie, first by his failure to create compelling lead characters due to which even his adept actors seem to flounder, especially the otherwise fresh and engaging Deschanel, who is more clueless here than anything I have ever seen her in. The second and more corrosive factor is his attempts at casual humor. Shyamalan has made little progress in the art of comedy since the colossal wipe-out that was ‘Lady in the Water’ and once again in an attempt to create a lighter space he fumbles badly unlike in his ‘Signs’, hardly a great film but which succeeded because of its sympathetic lead characters and finely judged sense of humor.

All of Shyamalan’s foibles take its toll on ‘The Happening’s decisive moment and while it is a moment he has once before orchestrated to great effect in ‘The Village’, here there’s so much ennui and incomprehension that the subtleties never really emerge.

With ‘The Happening’ there is an interesting development in Shyamalan that I’m not sure whether to cheer or deride. It’s a step down from the intense suspense and rigorous structure of ‘The Sixth Sense’ and ‘Unbreakable’ while it’s most certainly a step up from the drudgery of ‘The Village’ and ‘Lady in the Water’. He shows a tendency towards the ‘camp’ and there are times when intentionally or not, he is just damn good at it. Check out the ‘man in the lions’ cage’ video or that inspired sequence where the runaways shack in with a paranoid old recluse hag. Great silliness, a good amount of fear and high camp. Check John Leguizamo’s math teacher hamming his way to certain death via percentages and another student whose last confused words are- ‘Calculus’. The standout scene however is the sequence at a suburban house where everything is only as real as it looks. Something similar was also the high point of the recent Indy 4 movie on whose script Shyamalan had worked on and I did wonder if perhaps that wasn’t his lasting contribution to the Indy saga finally attributed to David Koepp, but in his own film, he draws from the great apocalypse camp classics of yore and ends the sequence with a signboard that says “You deserve this”

Touche Shyamalan Touche! Now if he only would unsubscribe his monthly Reader’s Digest and work on someone else’s material rather than writing his own. Maybe a pulpy murder mystery involving a suburban detective entangled in a messy divorce. Something to that order. Maybe remake the ‘Thin Man’ series.

‘The Happening’ is a disappointment. It was a concept pregnant with possibilities but Shyamalan’s fixation with a pseudo-message renders it nothing more than sheer hokum. Infact, I distinctly heard Mark Wahlberg say a dialogue to the tune of ‘This place is called Hokum’ but maybe that’s just my ears having a second off during the movie.

As you walk out the theatres there’s no chill up your spine, no questions on your mind,
you aren’t afraid you’ll see dead people, you’re not wondering what your destiny holds for you nor are you contemplating the grand scheme of things.

Just maybe you won’t be able to look at Tiramisu the way you used to anymore.

(pics by :- easyart, song by radioblogclub)

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