Show me a happy man

 
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‘What is it that you want?’

‘What everyone wants: to experience life; to wake up enthused; to be happy.’

This exchange almost at the start of Thirteen Conversations About One Thing sets the agenda for the whole of Jill Sprecher’s powerful and insightful film. Walker (John Turturro), a high school physics teacher, has come home late from work. He has a fading black eye and seems morose and withdrawn. We soon gather that he had been mugged a week previously, but that doesn’t explain the tension in the relationship with his wife Patricia (Amy Irving). Walker announces that he’s concluded that he must look on the positive side of the mugging: it’s shaken him out of his routine. Later, he will be asked again what he wants, this time by his doctor. But by then, he can only respond, ‘I’m not even sure any more.’ He comes to lament the loss of a zest for life which he sees in his students’ faces as they learn something new.

Ironically, this loss of focus, of meaning even, in Walker’s life is a result of him taking active steps to enliven his life. He has been having an affair with a married colleague, and he leaves Patricia for a small apartment of his own. After an illicit afternoon session with his lover, Walker declares, ‘I meant it before, when I said you’d changed my life. I’m different now. You’ve set me free.’ ‘From what?’ she asks. ‘A life of predictability,’ he replies, ‘dullness of routine. See you again Thursday, same time.’ We get a few opportunities to watch Walker interact with his students. In one lesson he moves on to the subject of entropy, eliciting from a student that it is the process of the universe becoming less ordered. ‘It can never go back to the way it was,’ he confirms, and writes ‘IRREVERSIBLE’ in large block letters on the board. It is a neat summary of the disintegration of his life.

Walker’s isn’t the only story told in Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. It is a film of multiple protagonists whose stories interlink to a greater or lesser extent. The various stories are also presented out of chronological order. We meet two of the other main characters in a bar. Troy (Matthew McConaughey) is a hotshot lawyer with the District Attorney’s office who is there with colleagues to celebrate winning a case. ‘Is it still happy hour?’ he asks the barman, before reflecting, ‘Happy hour. You wouldn’t think it to look around here. Still, at least I’m happy: just sent another low life to prison.’ These few lines of dialogue serve to tell us what kind of man Troy is. But they come straight after Walker’s statement that he wants to be happy, separated only by one of a number of title cards which appear during the film, this first one reading, ‘Show me a happy man.’ The repetition of ‘happy’ five times in under a minute reinforces that this is the theme for the film – the theme which ties the various stories together.

Troy’s comment prompts a man at the bar to engage him in conversation. The man is Gene English (Alan Arkin), a manager of the estimating section of an insurance company. He has a more jaundiced view of happiness:

Gene: Show me a happy man and I’ll show you a disaster waiting to happen.

Troy: If you don’t mind me asking, what makes you an authority on the subject?

Gene: I knew a happy man once. It was a curse.

Gene tells the story of someone in his office who won a $2 million lottery prize, resigned on the spot and walked out. But soon the money was gone or tied up in litigation and he wanted a job back. The man is a good illustration of one of Gene’s favourite sayings: ‘fortune smiles at some, and laughs at some others.’ The conversation continues:

Troy: Look, there’s one fundamental difference between your friend and myself: You see, it seems like he tried to take a shortcut. I earned it. I worked hard, I put in the hours, I went to court, I fought well, and I won.

Gene: Maybe you just got lucky. This once.

Troy: I don’t believe in luck. Luck is the lazy man’s excuse.

Gene: Spoken like a guy that’s had nothing but good luck.

A little later, Troy gives a colleague a lift home. On the way they discuss the court case. Troy is full of enthusiasm for their role within society:

That’s what’s so damn beautiful about our job, Owen. We prosecute the guilty. We hold them responsible for their actions. And I believe that’s what people want. They want an example. They want structure. Show them some concrete proof that there’s some order in this world, show them a system that can determine right from wrong and they’re going to show us a better society. And that’s exactly what we can give them.

Troy is clearly a man who has strong moral principles, a deeply engrained work ethic and who doesn’t believe in chance. But shortly after dropping Owen off, he fails to notice a young woman standing in the road and hits her. Believing that she is dead, he drives off and tells no-one. Suddenly, his life, too, is disintegrating. Outside the office block in which he works is an inscription, ‘The just man enjoys peace of mind.’ Troy has lost all his peace of mind, because he is wracked with guilt but doesn’t want to compromise his promising career by being honest.

Bea (Clea DuVall) is a cleaner in the homes of wealthy Manhattan residents. While her friend Dorrie (Tia Texada) is idle and constantly moans about everyone else, Bea is industrious, sweet-natured and wonderfully positive. Dorrie complains about her flatmate at one point and says to Bea, ‘One day you’re going to see I’m right: life isn’t fair.’ ‘Maybe it seems like that now,’ replies Bea, ‘but you don’t know what’s up ahead amazing things happen all the time.’   She tells the story of how she was saved from drowning as a child, but while she was in the water she had a vision which gave her a strong sense that, ‘everything would be all right – that I was saved for a reason.’ But when Bea is badly injured by a hit-and-run driver, her confidence in things happening for a reason seems to be destroyed. She later recounts to Dorrie that she reached the point of wanting to step in front of a bus – until a complete stranger smiled at her across the road. That simple action broke through her despair and enabled her to recognise the positives in life again.

The pursuit of happiness is something which is part of almost everyone’s life – in the western world at least. It is so much a part of human existence, it seems, that it is enshrined in the US Constitution as one of three ‘unalienable rights’ along with life and liberty. But as Jill and Karen Sprecher’s screenplay makes clear, there are many different perspectives on what is means, how to attain it, and even whether it is possible to attain. Troy starts out believing that happiness is entirely down to each individual and how hard they are prepared to work for it. It is, perhaps, the classic American approach to happiness: a combination of Protestant work ethic and American Dream. But he soon realises that it can all be gone in an instant as a result of something which appears to be chance. Bea believes everything happens for a purpose – but that’s easy when life is going well, when it is untroubled enough to be able to take pleasure in throwing a handful of freesia petals into the wind. When suffering and death come too close for comfort, it isn’t so easy to hang on to. Gene despairs of happiness, and is so ground down by life that he douses everyone else with his misery and irritability. Walker imagines that happiness must be about excitement and novelty, not realising that the contentment he had once enjoyed with his wife was something many people would envy. He’s looking for short-term gains at the expense of what he had achieved through years of investment – and discovers that they turn to ashes in his hands.

What is clear from all of the major characters is that our happiness is intimately bound up with our attitudes to ourselves and to others. Once Walker’s attention shifts to creating novelty for himself, he loses his centre and moral foundation. His preoccupation with himself makes him indifferent to agony endured by his wife when she discovers his affair, as well as to the needs and aspirations of his students. His selfishness has catastrophic consequences. Gene is constantly concerned with himself and his problems, which is why he finds the good-natured optimism and kindness of one of his team so infuriating. As another colleague points out to him, he seems to be jealous of what the other man has. Troy loses his peace of mind by becoming unjust, focusing on his career and freedom rather than facing up to what he has done and finding some redemption. Bea, like Walker, despairs of meaning because she cannot begin to see what benefits she is getting from her unpleasant experiences. If it has no obvious reason for her the suffering can have no reason; if what is around the corner isn’t good, then it’s best not to go around the corner at all.

Ultimately, it seems, it is the small things that nurture relationships that bring happiness into the world: a smile, a wave. Gene wonders what would have happened in his marriage if he had waved to his wife when leaving for a six-week training course rather than storming off down the road feeling cross. He reflects that we do not know what impact small things can have in someone else’s life. Two characters in this film rediscover some sense of happiness, albeit small at first, because of a random stranger’s kind gesture. The one person in the film who remains happy throughout is Wade (William Wise) who has made a conscious decision to see the best in situations and in people. He nurtures his relationships by spending time with them and by acts of kindness. He seems to be utterly unselfish.

These hints of happiness, some of them small and fragile, show clearly that what many people pursue is the wrong kind of goal. It’s not careers that make us happy, though they can help by giving us a sense of satisfaction. It’s not novelty or excitement, though it can help us feel happy for a short time. It’s not about warm, fuzzy thoughts of everything meaning something. The answer proposed by the film seems to be that it is ultimately working at relationships, whether with people we know or with complete strangers, which makes the difference. And yet the film also makes clear that people let us down catastrophically, and that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can all be snatched away by a moment of carelessness or a random occurrence.

A biblical understanding of happiness echoes much of this. It recognises that our inherent selfishness is what wrecks relationships and ultimately our own happiness. It recognises that in a broken, fallen world like ours, sometimes the moments of fragile joy are all we can hope for. But it also sees these as pointers to something much greater – not my personal happiness but a deep joy which comes from having peace of mind. The Bible sees human beings as created by God to know him and be in an intimate relationship with him. And therefore, if that relationship is not in place, we are not fulfilling our full human potential and will not have the ultimate peace of mind that comes only through that route. The Old Testament calls this all-encompassing peace shalom. It is not merely that we are not hurting each other, but a positive well-being which springs out of our peace with God and manifests itself in peace with others and with ourselves. Bea needed this much bigger picture to retain her peace after the accident. It’s not that believing in God and knowing God makes life easy to cope with, but that at the end of the day we can rest in the confidence that he is there, he does know what he’s doing, he does have our best interests at heart – and that his wisdom far exceeds our own and we therefore may not understand why something happens this side of the new heavens and new earth. That confidence can only come as one reflects deeply on what God’s son Jesus Christ did for us by dying on the cross in our place. In an act of unmatchable grace, he died the death that should have been mine because of my inherent self-centredness, my determination to always be calling the shots in life myself rather than subjecting myself willingly to wise authority of the one who made me. Accepting and knowing him is the way to true peace and true happiness, because I die to my self – I die to the self-defeating urge within me to grasp happiness on my terms – and I live for the one who died for me. It’s a crucial conversation which is missing from this marvellously thought-provoking film.

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