Review: Hector and the Search for Happiness

There is a gulf of difference between simple and simpleminded and where the childlike simplicity of François Lelord's popular novel enchants, the borderline brainlessness of the film adaptation exasperates. There are so many bones to pick with Hector and the Search for Happiness, which attempts to spackle elements of a travelogue, comedy and inspirational drama onto an already shapeless blob of a film.

Let's start with the slack and sluggish preamble: British psychiatrist Hector (Simon Pegg) has a satisfactory life, tidied and ordered with nary a complication. Something's not quite right, however. He feels he's lacking something within that would allow him to be a better doctor to his patients. After a mini nervous breakdown, Hector decides to travel the world in search of the secret to happiness. Ever supportive, his girlfriend Clara (Rosamund Pike) bids him farewell and tells him, "Make it worthwhile."

He appears to interpret her words as carte blanche to sow his oats for no sooner is he in Shanghai does he fall for a local student who turns out to be a prostitute. "Happiness could be the freedom to love more than one woman at a time," he notes in his journal which soon becomes bloated with more uplifting aphorisms ("Happiness is being loved for who you are," "Listening is loving") and his doodles, which are intermittently animated to inject bouts of whimsy to the leaden narrative.

Hector trudges onwards, encountering an assembly of characters that each offer their idea of happiness. Among them: the rich businessman (Stellan Skarsgaard) for whom work is bliss, the drug lord (Jean Reno) who resurrects his conscience, and an African woman who defines home and family as her felicities. This is a movie that wants to feel all the feels but, to paraphrase Hector, it does meaningless better than no one else, often playing like a low-rent Eat, Pray, Love or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Pegg is called upon to do some bits of bumbling, which he does with ease, but his primary function as Hector is to flail amidst the claptrap in which director Peter Chelsom has smothered him. It's a disservice to Pegg, a fine comic actor capable and deserving of much more.

It bears reminding that Rosamund Pike, though sometimes enlisted to display her substantial acting skill in An Education, Made in Dagenham and the television adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, was most often relegated to lightweight, decorative roles before her indelible turn in Gone Girl. Her appearance here as Clara is such an example, with Chelsom utilising her incandescence as substitute for actual character. It's a nimble feat that Pike, whose buttery blondness gainsays a prickly intelligence, manages to sell the notion of motherhood being Clara's key to true happiness without necessarily endorsing it.

Hector and the Search for Happiness

Directed by: Peter Chelsom

Written by: Maria von Heland, Peter Chelsom, Tinker Lindsay; adapted from François Lelord's novel

Starring: Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Stellan Skarsgaard, Christopher Plummer, Toni Collette, Ming Zhao, Jean Reno, Barry Atsma