Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)

The film is a global wellness brochure. Hector, a psychiatrist, abandons his practice to tour China, Africa, and Santa Monica in search of the secret formula. Simon Pegg is charming. The film mistakes a passport for a personality. Non-white characters exist as scenery: Ying Li, the sweet potato villagers, the kidnappers with the rat. They populate Hector's enlightenment without ever being asked for their own. The cast is led by white stars, and the world beyond them is a colorful set dressing for a Westerner's private reckoning.

The film's progressive gestures are small and largely incidental. Marcel turns out to be Michael's lover, and the two are happy together, a brief inclusion that registers and then evaporates. Clara's arc resolves into a desire for motherhood, closing the loop on a story that was always about a man finding himself. China and Africa serve as backdrops, never as places with their own textures or racial dynamics. A cranky businessman and a drug lord appear as obstacles, but the screenplay offers no argument about wealth itself. No environment enters the frame as a concern. No bodies are celebrated. No minds are examined beyond the label quirky, which here means eccentric and nothing more. History does not intrude, because there is none to revise.

Where the film does show conviction is in its lecturing. Professor Coreman, played with grim authority by Christopher Plummer, explains the happiness of pursuit, the brain scans, the colored flags. The film has a thesis and it intends to share it. Reviews were mixed, returns were modest, and the whole enterprise remains a search for a feeling the screenplay keeps describing instead of producing. We are told happiness is every emotion at once. We are shown a man on a plane.