|
 The
Happening
(aka The Green Effect)
Screenplay by M. Night
Shyamalan
January 7, 2007
Reviewed by Rich Drees
“An apocalyptic
tone poem.”
That’s how
Fellini described Alfred Hitchcock’s nature-strikes-out-at-man
thriller The Birds. It’s also one apt description for M.
Night Shyamalan’s latest screenplay, The Happening, a
harrowing nightmare vision against which a young couple fights to
survive. It is a vision that at one point almost seemed destined to
not make it to the silver screen.
Shyamalan
brought the screenplay, originally titled The Green Effect,
to Hollywood in January 2007, while the Philadelphia-based
writer/director was in Los Angeles working on the plans for his
cartoon-to-live action adaptation Avatar: The Last Airbender
for Paramount. Although he met with executives at most of the major
studios – Disney being the noted exception, with Shyamalan perhaps
still harboring bad feelings from the confrontation he had with now
ex-production president Nina Jacobson that led to him taking his
script for Lady In The Water to Warner Brothers – no one
moved to buy it. A rewrite later and Shyamalan made a second round
of the studios. The March 6, 2007 edition of Variety
reporting the results- 20th Century Fox greenlighting the film with
production to begin August 2007. As the film’s start drew nearer,
Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo
were announced as being cast as leads. It is Shyamalan’s initial
draft that is under scrutiny here.
One fall
morning, people begin to exhibit strange behavior before
inexplicably killing themselves. In Central Park, a woman reading a
book suddenly stabs herself in the throat with a hairpin. Blocks
away, workers on a construction site just casually walk off the iron
skeleton of a skyscraper, plummeting to their deaths. Meanwhile, in
a downtown Philadelphia apartment, Elliot and Alma are having an
argument. After months of trying, Alma realizes that their marriage
is no longer working and is preparing to leave Elliot. Elliot,
however, feels that there is still hope that they can repair their
relationship, but Alma disagrees.
As reports of
strange deaths begin to come in from cities around the world, some
believe that the mysterious deaths are part of a coordinated
terrorist attack, while others argue that there is no one connection
between the cities so far targeted. The school where Elliot teaches
science is dismissed. Elliott races home to collect Alma and then
meet his friend Julian and his child at Philadelphia’s 30th
Street Station in order to head out to the presumed safety of the
New Jersey countryside. But it is only after they begin their trek
do they begin to realize the scope of the death toll. People in big
cities, small towns and cars parked on the New Jersey turnpike all
succumb to the urge to kill themselves. Elliot begins to realize
that the deaths aren’t the result of a terrorist attack, but are
being caused by the release of a toxin by the surrounding plant life
in an evolutionary last-ditch attempt to protect themselves from the
predator that endangers them the most- man.
Much in the
same way Shyamalan’s Signs isn’t so much about an alien
invasion but how one man rediscovers his lost faith in God in the
middle of extraordinary circumstances, the events of The
Happening are merely the backdrop against which Elliot and Alma
rediscover their love for each other. Interestingly, the
screenplay’s original title, The Green Effect, refers not
only to nature’s attack on humanity, but to the climactic scenes of
the script’s third act, when the color green takes on additional
significance, becoming the element that facilitates Elliot and
Alma’s reconciliation. It seems a mistake to loose a title that has
layered meanings with the story for the more generic The
Happening, which only seems to highlight nature’s attack against
mankind and ignores the character-driven story that is the film’s
backbone. Unless it ties into some change Shyamalan has made to
the script based on the original round of studio notes.
(Oddly enough,
for an apocalypse story, there’s no real mention of religion.
Although Shyamalan has Elliot posit a scientific explanation for
what is going on, it would be hard not to imagine some would
interpret the events as God’s judgment on mankind.)
Shyamalan
clearly and deftly defines the Elliot and Alma relationship in the
first three pages of the script. Their marriage is falling apart.
Alma recognizes this but can’t get Elliot to see it himself. Elliot,
for his part, is clinging to the memory of what their relationship
was, rather than face what it has become. In this opening scene, he
tries to get out of an argument by postponing the discussion. “We’ll
talk about this later. We’re angry,” he says to Alma, oblivious to
the sarcasm in her reply, “That must be it Elliot.” Alma doesn’t
hate her husband though, and even tells him that she’s not trying to
hurt him. Unfortunately, it is this admission that Elliot latches on
to as hope that their marriage can be saved. It’s a complex dynamic
between the two and Shyamalan sketches it for the audience
gracefully through the simple dialogue of the scene.
For all the
foreground action that focuses on Elliot and Alma’s relationship,
Shyamalan doesn’t neglect the horror elements of the situations he
has conceived. He cannily mixes graphic images such as the early
deaths in New York City with other scenes, like one set in
Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, that play out just off-screen,
leaving the details to our imagination. Shyamalan doesn’t spare many
characters a grisly fate, either. Sweet old ladies walking their
dogs, commuters, teenagers and others going about their daily
routine are all indiscriminately killed by the plants’ toxin.
But the real
horror of the script is that with the sudden release of the toxin by
plants, man finds his taken-for-granted dominance over nature
suddenly gone and that he is quite literally surrounded by a quiet,
invisible killer against which there is no defense. There’s
something insidiously frightening in the simple descriptions of a
light breeze rustling the grass of New York’s Central Park in the
moments before the plants’ toxin begins to claim its first victims.
Filmed properly, and there’s no reason to believe that Shyamalan
wouldn’t do the image justice, this should produce suitable chills
in the audience.
Those coming to
the movie expecting another “Bruce Willis is really a ghost” type
twist ending with which some appear to expect from Shyamalan will be
sorely disappointed. At this point in his career, it should be
obvious that Shyamalan is more than a one-trick pony, a weaver of
supernatural O. Henry stories that send their audiences out theater
doors into the bright sunlight of a much safer and rational world
than the one they just witnessed, their minds still reeling from a
last minute storytelling hairpin curve. Instead, Shyamalan is a
fantasist with a fascination for the human condition. He is more
concerned with exploring human emotion and reaction than he is with
presenting the spectacle against which these stories invariably play
against. And while he may have recently stumbled with last year’s
Lady In The Water, this initial draft of The Happening
shows a writer/director working very much on all cylinders. |
