On a world tour in search of happiness
If you want to be truly happy, this film isn’t for you
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-the-world” journey consists of just three stops. The first is Shanghai, where he meets a hedonistic mil- lionaire, played by Stellan Skarsgard, 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 2 is “Africa.” Viewers will seek in vain for a more precise location, but the movie isn’t giv- ing 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 happi- ness can of course be found.
Along the way, he fills up his travel journal with a hodgepodge of grade-school wisdom, tattered cliches 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?
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.
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 it. For that, I’m happy.