Pete Croatto, Cinematters, October 2014

Hector and the Search for Happiness

An ICON contributor since 2006, Pete Croatto also writes movie reviews for The Weekender. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Broadway.com, Grantland, Philadelphia, Publishers Weekly, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @PeteCroatto.

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Here’s my review of Hector and the Search for Happiness: Get lost.

You want more, huh? OK. Life affirming fare works better if the characters learn after being challenged in some way. Veteran director Peter Chelsom isn’t interested in that idea. Hector and the Search for Happiness, an inspirational comedy based on François Lelord’s novel, gives us the warm and fuzzies, no chaser. The result is the first movie ever based on inspirational posters.

This journey starts with good intentions. Simply put, Hector (Simon Pegg) has lost his smile and it’s tarnishing everything, namely his psychiatry practice. When he verbally lashes an upper class mother for agonizing over reducing her nanny’s hours, Hector realizes he can’t help his patients find vhappiness when he can’t find it himself.

The answer is a getaway, but not the typical Eat, Pray, Love enlightenment package. Hector isn’t soul searching, at least that’s what he tells himself. This is for scientific research. His orderly, precise life of labeled sock drawers and breakfasts delivered with FedEx precision is fine. The practice is what’s suffering. So Hector visits China, Africa, and Los Angeles searching for an answer. He’ll return to England when he has one.

Hector learns plenty on his search, which he records—along with lovely ink drawings—in his little leather notebook. The whole enterprise feels inauthentic because Hector doesn’t grow. Pegg is a wonderful actor. He can play both cynical and wide-eyed for laughs and not strain going in either direction. The script, written by Chelsom, Maria von Heland, and Tinker Lindsay, does Pegg no favors. One moment we see a bitter, repressed man who runs his life with military precision. The second he hits the airport, he’s dressed like an explorer in a children’s storybook and lobbing one-liners at the flight attendant. Asked if he would like a drink, Hector quips: “Is the pope circumcised?”

It’s a funny line, and a telling one: Hector has already grown before the in-flight movie. So the trip is a sham, and it grows more and more unbearable as the world reveals to be at Hector’s beck and call. Everywhere he goes Hector meets kind souls who speak perfect English and are Disneyized models of ethnicity. If you’re fat, homely, or don’t sound like a United Nations translator, then scram. It is the world as amusement park, a place where your every need is met and, at times, anticipated. His gorgeous girlfriend, Clara (Rosamund Pike, who, like Pegg, tries her damnedest), caters to his every anal-retentive whim and promises to wait for him; the angry businessman (Stellan Skarsgård) sitting next to Hector ends up taking him for a wild night when their plane lands in China; a super-nice African lady (S’Thandiwe Kgoroge) offers to make Hector sweet potato stew after they land. Wouldn’t you know it? She does. And her whole happy, signing clan adores their new white friend. Even the warlord running the veldt (Jean Reno) tolerates him.

Hector isn’t from our world. When talking to Clara for the first time in days, he announces that he was kidnapped like he’s just read The Catcher in the Rye or saw God in his pancakes. He’s not wide-eyed, but a recipient for watery morals dispensed by ethnic mascots and their crazy cultures featuring corruption and kidnapping. Even when the world is bad, it’s still pretty good, right? More lessons for everyone! 

No. I can’t put faith in a movie that spoon-feeds us the homilies found in the small books sold at gift shops—the ones inevitably given to us by relatives who are either bereft of ideas or don’t know us very well—as true wisdom.

Especially when Chelsom displays zero respect for us as thinking people. This is the kind of movie where a white woman wearing pearls and a scowl sits in business class as Hector cares for a sick (and wise!) woman of indeterminate ethnicity. This is the kind of movie where Christopher Plummer’s brain researcher is shown to be a cool dude by dressing like Marvin Gaye circa What’s Going On. This is the kind of movie where Chelsom uses brief snippets of Hector as a child—in jumbly home movies, in dream sequences—as emotional depth. This is the kind of movie where Chinese monks brag about having Skype to signify that it really is a small world after all. This is the kind of movie where Hector’s latest nugget of knowledge—“Happiness is answering your calling”—unfurls on the screen in a happy, affirmative font. Even as it’s being recited to us.

Any charm is extinguished with wave after wave of grab-life-by-the-collar proselytizing. I would recommend it to kids, only the movie’s spell-it-out approach to life resembles the solemn health class videos about abstaining from sex or turning down drugs that I endured in high school. Hector and the Search for Happiness is empty, condescending, and myopic. Chelsom not only thinks he has something important to say—he shouts it into our ears with a bullhorn.

My original review stands. [R]