Movie Review - Hector And The Search For Happiness

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2014 – Spoiler alerts A very disappointing Simon Pegg led comedy directed by Peter Chelsom. Pegg plays Hector, a London psychiatrist who is bored with life. He is indifferent to his patients and develops an inexplicable urge to travel the World seeking the meaning of happiness. His girlfriend, (the very under-used Rosalind Pike), seems happy to let him go, only objecting and missing him during his Skype calls home. Hector spends much of the film on a personal grand tour binge, drinking champagne on first class flights, bunking up with a Chinese prostitute and swimming in the pools of rich friends in California. Occasionally he gets into trouble, such s his collision with car-jackers in Kenya wo are going to kill him until he proves that he really is a drinking buddy with a local drug dealer. Eventually, after an experiment by a self-help guru (Christopher Plummer) Hector learns that he would be happier back home with his girlfriend after all, so he goes home to get married. It’s the clichéd standard yarn of seeking truth everywhere else to find you had it on you all the time. The problem is that Hector is essentially an insensitive, selfish jerk. His attitude to his patients is dismissive and we never get to know them as people, just as a montaged mass of eccentricities. Hector also has money to make his round the World pilgrimage with, a luxury most unhappy people could never start with. There are occasional moments of insight, a in the Buddhist monks who offer sage aphorisms while putting a satellite TV dish up on their temple roof, and Hector offering comfort to a cancer patient during a flight, when the film forgets that he is a psychiatrist and not a surgeon. The film tries to be a travelogue and a rom-com, but it is too fragmented, and essentially depicts Pegg’s Hector as an affluenza suffering selfish man in a mid-life crisis, with money to spare. A film about happiness should not suck the joy out of you, but this one does. Arthur Chappell