Who doesn’t love Simon Pegg? Bring a hater before me so that I may punish them for this dishonor! Don’t worry, you won’t find such an individual, because Mr. Pegg has yet to reach a Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, or Adam Sandler (and the list goes on and on) level of comedy movie saturation. Despite his level of popularity and talent, the witty Britty isn’t being tossed into every dumbass flick he can get his hands on. Great! I would love to see him getting more work, because I enjoy laughing at his gifts in timing and physicality, but I would hate for him to overdo it the way so many of his colleagues have. As sad a fate as that could be, however, I would hate it more if he jumped onto any more projects like Hector and the Search For Happiness.
Hector is an awful psychiatrist who secretly denigrates his wacky patients (the movie has about as much respect for them as he does). He’s not a terrible guy. He charges lower rates than any other London doctor in his field, and he even kind of listens when the patients are talking. At home, he has a tragically dull and rather superficial relationship with his girlfriend, Clara (Rosamund Pike). She controls every aspect of his life like an obsessive surrogate mother, they are clearly very rich, and he is… content? In the midst of this routine, Hector is actually completely lost and unhappy. His mood begins swinging so wildly that he starts driving his patients away. For some reason, that’s supposed to be funny. No need to worry about the psychiatrist who is… insane. He chooses to temporarily leave Clara (who immediately decides to give him total carnal freedom on his journey) so he can travel the world in an effort to discover what happiness actually is.
He discovers many things. He discovers so much about the world that one begins to wonder how the hell this moron earned a medical license. How does a grown man, this well-educated, go to China and not wonder for an instant if the beautiful young stranger who introduces herself at a ritzy nightclub might be a prostitute? Whoops! Picked up a prostitute! Many such devil-may-care high jinks ensue in Africa and Los Angeles, as well. That is, until the really scary horror things happen. As if designed to mirror Hector’s mood swings, the film shifts violently from cartoonish goofball comedy to dark-and-gritty drama. So sure, the movie itself is not totally blind to how frightening the world can be, but to top off the mess of unlikable characters (an all-star cast mostly goes to waste), unfunny jokes, and tonal instability, the filmmakers have attempted to sew the tattered pieces of movie together with the most chintzy life lessons you can think of. After every big moment, handwritten text scrolls across the screen, and its not much more significant than anything you read on a coffee mug or bumper sticker. Once the mostly 2 hours of confusion grinds to an end, it turns out his entire emotional crisis could have been solved by his girlfriend telling him what she wants in order to be happy.
Let’s think about that for a second. This guy is losing his mind. He travels the world, makes an earnest attempt to cheat on his girlfriend, climbs mountains to live with monks, gets abducted by African gangsters, almost tells an old flame in L.A. that he is still in love with her, doesn’t actually learn anything about himself in the process (accept that “to listen is a gift”… MIGHT have picked that one up studying psychiatry at some point?), and in the end… (spoiler alert) all he needed was for his girlfriend to tell him she wants to get married and have a baby. Problem solved, because suddenly, that is also what he wants. If you ask me, that’s just a little too tidy for the complicated world we were introduced to earlier. Like Hector, apparently I should have stayed home.
