HECTOR FINDS HIMSELF, BUT NEARLY LOSES THE PLOT
Hector And The Search For Happiness (15) Verdict: Flaky but likeable The Congress (15) Verdict: Ambitious, but unwatchable
IF YOU can believe in Simon Pegg as a buttoned-up psychiatrist (and clearly the director Peter Chelsom could, even if it’s a bit of a stretch for the rest of us), then you might enjoy this whimsical tale of a man who takes off on a kind of delayed gap year driven by a mid-life crisis.
Pegg plays Hector, who becomes disillusioned with his ordered existence when he realises he’s not making his patients any happier, and isn’t particularly happy himself, despite punching somewhat above his weight, if only in the looks department, with his attentive girlfriend Clara (Rosamund Pike).
So Hector takes off to find himself, and more specifically to find the elusive state of happiness, a quest which yields meaningful encounters with a rich banker, a Shanghai prostitute, a Tibetan monk, a South American drug baron and finally his ex-girlfriend (Toni Collette) and her charismatic mentor, a psychology lecturer appealingly played by Christopher Plummer. He also gets kidnapped by African guerillas and shut up in a cell with only rats for company. With The Inbetweeners 2 and now this, I can see parents having second thoughts about sending their darlings off on gap-year travels.
Based on the novel by Francois Lelord, it’s quirky stuff, with odd lurches of tone from knockabout comedy to soulful poignancy. It’s also more than a little twee in the way that every chapter of Hector’s adventure is introduced by a fortune-cookie platitude about happiness.
Chelsom can do quirks and whimsy
better than this — his 1991 debut feature hear My Song was charming. And yet, even as I sensed the people around me at the screening huffing and s i ghing at t he measured flakiness of it all, I found it rather sweet and likeable.
The Congress had the opposite effect. The vibe around me was appreciative, but I found it, in the end, almost unwatchably mannered.
It begins intriguingly, though, with Robin Wright playing a washed-up movie star called ... Robin Wright. She lives with her two teenage children in a converted aircraft hangar just outside the perimeter fence of an airport, though heaven knows why, and she is forced to listen as her agent, played by harvey Keitel, harangues her for making bad career choices. So bad have been those choices that she has only one left to make: should she accept an offer from the powerful head of ‘Miramount’ Studios (Danny huston, unveiling his inner harvey Weinstein), who wants to buy her image and indeed her soul, so that he can he use her virtual alter ego however he likes.
This is where things get truly weird, as director Ari Folman (who enjoyed great acclaim with his 2008 animated documentary Waltz With Bashir) switches from live action to a kaleidoscopic cartoon world, in which the man who animates Wright (voiced by Mad Men’s Jon hamm) falls in love with her.
It’s admirably ambitious, but wacky beyond belief, and in my case, frankly, beyond tolerance.