Hector and the Search for Happiness
Director: Peter Chelsom
Talent: Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgård
Release Date: 15th August 2014
Occupying a British-budgeted niche somewhere in between Eat, Pray, Love and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Hector and the Search for Happiness is the story of Hector (Simon Pegg), a London psychiatrist who has lost faith in his ability to experience happiness. He thus embarks on an impromptu round-the-world trip, hoping to research that most elusive aspect of human experience.
Hector documents his observations as numbered aphorisms (“Sometimes happiness is not knowing the full story.” “Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.”) in a tweely illustrated travel notebook, the artefact of worldly wisdom around which his (and the film’s) project progresses. His often exciting or bewildering experiences are thus, through this analytical process, given a rather more banal shape, to be consumed in the same suburban manner as the work of famous life philosophy snake-oil merchants such as Alain de Botton, or the Dalai Lama. This is applied ethics on safari, and of the three locations Hector visits — China, Africa and Los Angeles — can you guess which one is rendered in the most racially problematic way?
That’s right: it’s Africa! The problem there is that their horrid leaders steal all the aid money generously donated by the West. Which is not to say that Hector’s inadvertent encounter with a Chinese prostitute (“Agh! You tricked me!”) in Shanghai is not nauseating in its own right. In a film which contains a multi-millionaire sex tourist (Stellan Skarsgård), a drug baron exploiting African farmland (Jean Reno), and a psychiatrist po-facedly mining former colonies for some Middle English concept of happiness, when evil shows its face, it is that of a nameless African paramilitary leader, who imprisons Hector in one of the film’s more tolerable sequences. That Hector and the Search for Happiness manages to be so misjudged and condescending even at the level of its ostensible intellectual project — namely, to interrogate the notion of happiness — is a testament to the profound incompetence of the cabal of middlebrow, neoimperialist, sub-Mitch Albom white supremacists involved in its production.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
For more cinema coverage this month, check out our reviews of:
Hector and the Search for Happiness, The Rover, Pudsey The Dog: The Movie, Boyhood, The Grand Seduction, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Grand Central, Finding Vivian Maier, Joe
