Hector and the Search for Happiness belongs to Koch films, Egoli Tossel Films and its associated peoples.
“You hold all the cards, Hector” grins the Tibetan monk. It’s a shame that he’s not playing poker.
It’s Thanksgiving up in somewherepostcultureland and that means that we are dragged back to the quaint little hamlet of our births in order to massacre turkeys in the name of some hungry god of year-end feasts and despondent familial gatherings.
It also means that Derek has no excuse to not spend time with me since he’s in the area. To celebrate this coming together of such intellectual forces, we felt it prudent to strive out and experience something that had not been done in quite some time. We wanted to see a movie.
Unfortunately, Derek already saw Gone Girl which left us with woefully nothing else to watch. When your options are Dracula Untold and Hector and the Search for Happiness, you have to wonder if you’re really left with a choice at all. Neither Derek nor I knew anything about Hector and his happiness but we certainly knew enough about Dracula and his untelling to choose the former. Course, that Hector was featuring only once a day at the late hour and in the small theatre should have been hint enough but we both enjoyed ‘That Guy from Hot Fuzz” enough to give the movie a shot. We arrived just as it was starting to a theatre that must have literally held six other people. Well, at the very least it would give me something to talk about on the blog.
I think Hector’s greatest failing is in it being so… safe. It’s generic. It’s a movie. I don’t really know how else to describe the experience. It was fine, both Derek and I intoned as we left the theatre. The biggest problem was that it wasn’t made for us. It’s a rom-com, likely the one genre least likely to spur our interest. Had we taken dates and not been each other’s date, I’m sure we would have gotten something by the end to warrant the ten dollar admission. Overall, the movie is light on the comedy, light on the romance and heavy on the sentimentality.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Those that want to skip having to look up the wikipedia article to learn the movie’s narrative can read on! Those that are already bored with this movie, well, congratulations I just saved you two hours.
Hector opens with probably its best scene. Simon Pegg (see, I do know his name after all) is flying a little yellow biplane with a great French flag on its ass, dressed in clothing reminiscent of a nineteen-twenties silent pilot film. In his passenger seat is a black and white pug with goggles and scarf with both passengers grinning from ear to ear as they soar amongst the clouds. Hector, getting wrapped up in the whole adventure, decides to do a barrel roll. My first thought as the plane starts to tilt is “There is no way that dog could be strapped in” and, sure enough, as the plane flips upside down, the little black and white pug falls out like a stone to plummet through the bottom of the screen. Well, now I’m grinning ear to ear as Hector slowly realizes the horror of his actions.
Then some cartoon villain pops out from the seat and tries to strangle Hector.
Needless to say the protagonist wakes up. We’re then greeted to Hector’s day to day life, narrated in a children’s storybook style with a grandfatherly narrator that details how Simon Pegg lives a structured, orderly life with toast properly squared each morning and his dutiful girlfriend happily settled into a mothering role of caring to Hector’s near OCD needs. We discover that Hector is a therapist who has a seemingly complex door arrangement in order to keep his patients from ever seeing one another. Of course, the film is quick to point out that, much like his morning routine, Hector is disconnected from the routine of his job and simply returns stock replies to his patients all the while doodling pointless pictures on his notepad and arranging a follow up session the next week. Hector’s girlfriend, Miss Frost from Die Another Day, is some marketing member of a large pharmaceutical company and during a celebration for their latest successful ad campaign she is teased for still being unmarried while Hector sits silently at the table.
And by now it is absolutely clear the entire plotline of the story. Hector is going to realize that his job is a sham and is going to go on some grand journey vaguely reminiscent of the Grand Tour in order to discover that true happiness is in his heart and putting a ring on his girlfriend’s finger.
And that’s exactly what happens.
It’s a story filled with cliches and empty moralities in order to give the audience “the feels” of thinking they’re watching something touching, sweet or profound. It’s none of those. Hector is safe, standard and espouses traditional ideals. Presumably that’s what its audience is there to see.
Personally, I find it boring. For what it was, I can’t say whether it was any better or worse than any other movie with the same aspirations. As I’ve said, I have no interest in the genre or the story-telling. Ostensibly, the biggest conflict in the movie is that Hector is longing for some old girlfriend Agnes and his whole trip to “research what makes people happy to help his patients” is simply an excuse to check up on Agnes to see if she wants to hook up again.
What I personally found, however, was beneath all the generic sentimentality was a rather hilariously morally bereft story. The very first day Hector is on this journey of “self-discovery” he invites a prostitute back to his room in Shanghai and tries to bed her while listing some rubbish about “Happiness is the ability to love two women simultaneously.” Of course, Hector has no idea that the young Chinese girl is a prostitute and when he discovers this, he is absolutely devastated. The movie then moves on as if something of value was learned.
Except, not once is Hector’s lack of fidelity truly addressed. Presumably his disconnect with Miss Frost for these last five years stems from his emotional affair he’s having with the photograph of him, Michael and Agnes on a beach during college. And the first thing he does on his trip is physically fool around behind his girlfriend’s back (which he never discloses to her). Hector supports this unpleasant prostitution by indulging and endorsing his banker friend’s lifestyle. When in Africa, he assists a well known drug lord which, presumably, we’re suppose to believe is led to reform his wicked ways because Hector showed him a spot of kindness.
Of course he doesn’t. Not to mention his continual habit of stealing people’s property and never returning it. Though, I suppose we’re meant to take his pen thefts as a charming quirk. Clearly whoever wrote this story was not on the receiving end of a perpetual pen thief. It becomes less charming when it’s your only pen they nab.
And what movie would it be if there weren’t some awful, convoluted and ultimately empty science thrown in as a cheap mechanic to try and justify the sappy tale. When Hector does meet up with Agnes he discovers that she’s happily married with children and not pining after Hector and his gallant return in the august years of her life. When learning of his “Happiness Search” she instructs him to visit with some crackpot scientist who is researching happiness. The audience is then introduced to the narrator and, thankfully, the initial impression is that this man is off his rocker than an honest to god scientist doing serious science. I mean, he walks around spouting nonsense like “It is not the pursuit of happiness which is important but the happiness of pursuit” while wearing some ratty toque and looking slightly deranged and possibly high. His “experiment” is to shove someone into an isolated box which looks suspiciously like a soundproof booth and have his participants think of three random memories which invoke either sadness, happiness or fear. He then guesses the order of the conjured memories based on neuronal activation monitored on his end.
Oddly enough, his booth doesn’t block cell phone signals which makes you wonder why he’s shoving them into an isolation booth in the first place if it doesn’t isolate anything. This is the moment when Hector gets a call from his girlfriend and after his sad thought (her marrying someone else) and his fear thought (being killed by African warlords) he confesses his trip and… does something? Possibly says he loves her, it’s kind of vague and the scientist exclaims with triumph as if he’s witnessing something profound “It’s all three!”
This, of course, is transposed over images of the Tibetan monastery with its stupid little coloured flags whipping in the wind with the scientist’s stupid coloured brain flashing the same colours. The music swells as actors hemorrhage emotion from their eyes and we all feel better about ourselves even though nothing is being said or learned. Hector’s problem was ultimately solved by having a telephone conversation with his girlfriend which could have easily been held back at London and didn’t necessitate him promoting destructive behaviours like the excess of Shanghai investment banking and Africa drug trading. He then returns to London to continue conning his patients out of their money with his weekly sessions but this time everyone is doing it with a big grin so presumably that makes it all better.
No, ultimately what I wanted to see would be an investigation of happiness. What makes people happy and is happiness ultimately something worthwhile to pursue? This movie seeps with Western standard armchair philosophy that happiness is the be all and end all of our life goals. And yet, we get some glimpses of things otherwise. The investment banker is incredibly rich and has traded traditional happiness with the accumulation of money and the fake reality which he is able to buy with it. He builds his happiness in the illusion that hookers are young college students who fall enormously in love with these old, out of shape white men who come and are just the hippest thing at their little dance clubs.
Then there’s the African drug lord who sells a very different kind of happiness. People who partake of his drugs are getting euphoria just as fake as the bankers and, presumably, just as destructive. There’s a parallel between the drug lord and banker which goes completely ignored. Not to mention there’s the unspoken association of wealth and happiness. Hector and his girlfriend joke a couple of times about Hector’s experience in Shanghai being “so that’s how the rich live” and yet both of them have lucrative work and live extraordinarily well in London (their flat has its own, private elevator!). Even married Agnes is living quite well with her mathematician husband in a grand house with its own pool.
Ultimately, Hector’s search for happiness is the well-to-do, white upper class westerner’s search for happiness. It’s peering through the tiny Skype box at a world of lavish bathrooms trying to find that one item or object that will bring meaning and joy to their life. I can’t be the only one that finds it incredibly shallow that the best Hector can scrape from his experiences is that happiness is some girl and getting married. It’s about as meaningful as his little book filled with those delightful phrases, “Happiness is not know the full story.”