13 Conversations About One Thing Review
by Tim Wick
To paraphrase one of the more famous documents in American history, We hold these truths to be self evident, that each person is afforded the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The pursuit of happiness.
Just what does it mean to pursue happiness? How do we become happy? How do we stay happy? If we do good things does that by neccessity mean good things will happen to us? If we do bad things does that mean we will be punished?
Such heady questions are the meat that the characters in 13 Conversations About One Thing are chewing on. They all want happiness but they either don't know how to achieve it, don't know how to keep it or don't understand why others are happy when they are not.
The film follows a plot structure similar to Robert Altman's Short Cuts (a movie I don't particulary care for) and P. T. Anderson's Magnolia (a movie I love). We see the workings of several character's lives but their lives don't seem to intersect. Over the course of the film, we see the connections begin to take shape and understand that while their lives may not truly intersect, they are all involved in the same journey at more or less the same time.
Much like last year's Waking Life, the film seems to be more about a philosophical exploration of the human experince than telling a story. At least at first. Eventually we see that the philosophy is the basis for a gentle exploration of hope, doubt and even personal redemption.
The film primarily focuses on four individuals. Gene (Alan Arkin) is a mid-level manager who is miserable and resents those who are not. Troy (Matthew McConaughey) is a lawyer who is happy with his job but must live with a horrifying mistake. Walker (John Turturro) is a college professor whose marriage is on the rocks and who believes he has found the road to happiness. The film's soul is Beatrice (Clea DuVall), a cleaning woman who has a perpetually sunny disposition until something terrible happens.
Beatrice believes that everything happens for a reason and that there is no such thing as bad luck. When her belief is shaken, we see her running the risk of turning into someone like Gene. Gene thinks that happiness is a joke. He views a perpetually cheeful man in his office as someone who is lying to himself and other and sets about to find a way to make this man admit that he is not happy. He does not seem capable of understanding that happiness is possible in others because it is not possible within himself.
For a long time, the film seems to be hopeless and it would have lost me had it remained that way. If all it was doing was saying that there is no hope in life, that happiness is always fleeting and we have no control over the world we live in, I would have wondered what the point was. But that was not where the film was going at all.
The one thing we do have control over, we learn, is our own sense of self worth. A smile is infectious and kindness is repaid in ways we can never fully understand. When we smile to that depressed woman on the subway, we may never know that what we did turned her life around. We don't need to know that. We simply need to know that the secret to being happy is chosing not to be unhappy.
As one reads the paper these days, it becomes increasingly difficult to have faith in who we are. We read about murders, wars, prejudice and pain. We can choose to allow these things to control our lives or we can choose to allow them to teach us that we must be better than that. The answer, this film suggests, is not to join the peace corps. The answer is to allow ourselves to enjoy the life we have been given because it is precious. In enjoying that life, we teach others to enjoy theirs.
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