Hector and the search for happiness
Hector and the Search for Happiness
It might be naive to expect to find the secret of joy in a 114-minute comedy, but a title like Hector and the Search for Happiness can raise one’s hopes; alas, only to dash them again. The only thing I found in this self-satisfied travelogue was nausea; as if I’d just eaten an entire barrel of fortune cookies, with the fortunes still inside them.
Simon Pegg stars as Hector, a psychiatrist with a booming practice in central London, a lovely home, a devoted and beautiful girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) and enough spare cash that he can, on short notice, afford to take several months off to travel aimlessly around the planet. He is therefore, as I think most of us would be in his place, supremely unsatisfied with his life.
Hector decides to set off around the world and find out what makes people happy, with the assumption that it will help him become happier too. (Thus his first error: Not everything that makes others happy will do the same for you. Just ask a sadist. Or a masochist, depending on your proclivities.)
Oddly, his “round-theworld” journey consists of just three stops. The first is Shanghai, where he meets a hedonistic millionaire, played by Stellan Skarsgård, and a happy hooker (Ming Zhao), requisite of all such picaresque adventures. There’s also a brief side trip into the mountains to meet a monk.
Stop two is “Africa.” Viewers will seek in vain for a more precise location, but the movie isn’t giving anything away. Clearly it’s not downtown Johannesburg. Rather it’s that large swath of the continent where poverty prevails, kidnappers lurk, elephants roam free and so can a French drug lord (Jean Reno). Finally, Hector touches down in Los Angeles, where true happiness can of course be found.
Along the way, he fills up his t ravel journal with a hodgepodge of grades c hool wisdom , tattered clichés and specious observations. Some examples? #1: Making comparisons can spoil your happiness. #6: Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness. #8: Happiness is answering your calling. #10: Sweet potato stew! But the prize for the lamest and most incongruous platitude goes to #15: Nostalgia is not what it used to be. For this he travels 40,000 kilometres?
Hector also gets himself into and out of a variety of scrapes, many of them the result of not having a pen — though he always has a nib at the ready to write down “happiness is being loved for who you are,” or any of the other sophistries passing for sophistication in this movie. In Shanghai he mistakes a prostitute for just a very friendly woman; in Africa he gets himself almost accidentally abducted. The tone of the adventure is a little like last year’s remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, except more dry and British.
I would accuse director Peter Chelsom of ripping off that movie, but for the fact that this one is based on a 2002 book, Le voyage de l’Hector ou la recherche du bonheur, by a bona fide psychiatrist, François Lelord. Chelsom had a go at the adaptation along with two other writers, though it’s clear no one here is making use of any more advanced education than Screenwriting 101.
There’s certainly no neurobiology in their toolbox, given the wonky science spouted by Christopher Plummer in a cameo as a researcher trying to figure out bliss at the cellular level. (Another problem with this scene: You probably shouldn’t use your cellphone during a brain scan.)
There’s also very l i tt l e sensitivity on display to foreign sexes (i.e., women) and cultures (i.e., non-British), or for that matter to elephants or drug lords. Pike’s character basically gets to wait around until Hector figures out what he wants out of life. The Africans are carefree and given to impromptu block parties, while the monks are wise and beatific to a fault. The film’s one moment of truth comes when Hector licks his pen and writes: “Psychiatry comes with affluence.” He doesn’t seem to quite realize that this pretty much negates the rest of the plot, but at least he admitted i t. For that, I’m happy. Σ
Hector and the Search for Happiness opens Sept. 26