Toronto 2014 Review: HECTOR AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS, Cluelessly Earnest
The patron saint of smashing entitlement into smithereens, Louis C.K., has a great bit about being Caucasian. The gist of it is that he can hop in a time machine and go back in history, and there will be a waiter attentively greeting him, "Your table is right over her, sir."
With all the think pieces being written about white privilege in the wake of Ferguson, Missouri, the timing is exquisitely poor for Peter Chelsom's Hector and the Search for Happiness (hereafter Hector) the story of a wealthy white working professional who gets to travel the world, often seated first class, to find out why he should stay with his girlfriend and procreate -- if this were a sharper, more satirical affair, the words Consume and Obey would accompany the latter.
Blowing off his gorgeous and funny girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) to travel from downtown London to Shanghai where Hector goes happily whoring with a rich businessman (Stellan Skarsgard) he met on a plane. He falls in love with a pretty Chinese call-girl before discovering what is obvious to anyone who has ever seen a film before. And then he chalks the experience up to "Ignorance is Bliss." Ah, white privilege. He travels to possibly the same Tibetan monastery from 1984s The Razor's Edge (a movie now looking a whole lot better by comparison) and installs a satellite dish, a la those IBM commercials made a decade ago so he can Skype back to England.
Then it is off to Africa and I mean Africa as a country, not a continent, where every evening is picturesque Acacia Trees against the savannah sunset with free-range lions and foreign aid workers and violent men with Kalashnikovs. His foolish white ass is saved, of all things, by a golden pen, and of course, drug dealer with a heart of gold, Jean Reno.
Wrapping up in Los Angeles, Hector tracks down his old romantic flame (Toni Colette) for advice. She is now quite domestic and grounded but also professionally involved in the psychiatry-research community. They visit Christopher Plummer's high tech happiness laboratory as a site to deliver the most hackneyed and obligatory of climaxes; complete with CGI colour coding and Plummer fist-pumping the results.
Hector is earnest to a fault, espousing the most painfully conservative values under a liberal and saccharine "listening is loving" and cultural tourism attitude. All of this, admittedly covers up solid enough craft, careful setting up plot points and pay-offs, and a loving attention to Hergé kind of detail. It would make a fine double bill with J.A. Bayona's The Impossible.
It is guilty of squandering solid performances and an concept ripe for comedy if only carried off with a little more irreverence and guts; that is to say, not so damn eager to increase the happiness quotient of the universe at the expense of everything else for the sake of pleasing it's all too obvious middle class white demo. It makes me pine for a classic Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, a fine example from the 1940s (a decade of white privilege if there ever was one) that manages to have its cake and eat it too.
Never content to ask a question with a question, Hector and The Search For Happiness is the type of film that spells out, literally on screen in text-overlays, exactly what you want to hear. I would say that it exists somewhere in the recent cinematic landscape between Eat, Pray Love and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that is if I had gotten past the Hallmark greeting card nature of those pandering and facile seeming studio flicks. We all have our biases. This film will confirm yours and you are entitled to it, as Louis C.K. says, with the requisite consequences down the road.
Hector and the Search for Happiness
Director(s)
- Peter Chelsom
Writer(s)
- Maria von Heland (screenplay)
- Peter Chelsom (screenplay)
- Tinker Lindsay (screenplay)
- François Lelord (novel)
Cast
- Simon Pegg
- Rosamund Pike
- Tracy Ann Oberman
- Jean Reno
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