Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)
Directed by Peter Chelsom
Hector is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara, he feels like a fraud: he hasn’t really tasted life, and yet he’s offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results.
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This all feels like an homage to Gilliam’s “Brazil,” though “Zero Theorem” also has shadows of “12 Monkeys” and other films in the onetime Monty Python animator’s cinematic carnival.
It's almost doubly disappointing that Chelsom ditches Skarsgård to cut to a snowy Sherpa hike sequence, which is practically shot-for-shot the same as the one in Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, another film about an uptight white man who searches for his soul in Asia.
The tone of the adventure is a little like last year’s remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, except more dry and British.
As adapted for cinema by the British writer-director Peter Chelsom (Hear My Song) it resembles Ben Stiller's recent misbegotten version of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, except much worse.
Hector and the Search for Happiness is part fable, part self-help manual with echoes of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , but like that film, there's a considerable gap between its deeply profound objective and the soft handling.
From Peter Chelsom, the director of “Hannah Montana: The Movie,” comes “Hector and the Search for Happiness.”
Directed by Hannah Montana: The Movie helmer Peter Chelsom and occupying pretty much the same intellectual level, Hector is a comedy that takes its self-serving version of wisdom so seriously, it ends up a grotesque self-parody.
An erratic director who most recently helmed 2009’s “Hannah Montana: The Movie” and the 2004 remake of “Shall We Dance,” Chelsom (who co-wrote the script with Maria von Heland and Tinker Lindsay) has attempted to inject some visual life into Lelord’s source material — mainly by plastering Hector’s words of wisdom in capital letters across the screen and animating the cute drawings in his notebook.
For a moment, as he fast-cuts through the daily routines of his eponymous hero, director Peter Chelsom ( Serendipity , Hannah Montana: The Movie ) appears to be doing a slightly sluggish imitation of Shaun director Edgar Wright’s style.
The film’s director is Peter Chelsom, a one-time actor who years ago directed the charming Hear My Song (1991) and the cult black comedy Funny Bones (1995), but whose most recent feature credit is Hannah Montana: The Movie.
That said, there is something about Chelsom’s film, his first since the Hannah Montana: The Movie in 2009, that occasionally has the power to win you over.