Welcome to
Happiness is more interested in being cutesy than being satisfying. The
film from first-time writer-director Oliver Thompson, with bouncy songs backing
every single scene, a magic door, and mystical figures offering big-grinned life
guidance, is basically an extended self-help commercial masquerading as a
movie. The movie is about a children’s book author, and Welcome to Happiness feels like a child’s understanding of morality
and forgiveness—and for adults, it’s not that enlightening.
The film focuses on twentysomething Woody Ward (Kyle
Gallner), who has published four children’s books and is in the middle of
writing his fifth, “Rutherford the Complacent Cat.” He’s mired in writer’s
block, but he has another responsibility as well: Every so often, he receives a
fax with some questions on it. A stranger will knock on his door. He’ll ask the
stranger the questions from the fax, he’ll ask the stranger to hold a rock and concentrate
on a specific color, and if the rock’s partner turns the color the person was
concentrating on, then he’ll show them a special, magic door in his closet.
The door has no handle, and Woody has never seen the door
open from the other side. But the strangers will always end up going through
it, and Woody will never see them again. It’s a strange responsibility to have,
and Woody has never wondered what the door does, but he trusts his landlord
Moses (Nick Offerman), so he does it.
Aside from the Woody storyline, there are two others
being told during Welcome to Happiness:
One focuses on an orphan, Ripley (Josh Brener), still living in his parents’
mansion after they were murdered during a break-in years before. He meets the
self-hating Niles (Brendan Sexton III) when he agrees to buy a rare baseball
card Niles is selling, and Ripley then puts Niles in contact with Proctor
(Keegan-Michael Key), an eccentric weirdo who then pushes Niles in Woody’s
direction.
There’s a web of people here interacting with each other,
and each of them is looking for something. Woody wants understanding of the
door and what opportunity it offers—and why he’s never been chosen to go
through. Ripley wants to be able to move on from his parents’ shocking death.
Niles wants forgiveness for something he’s done in the past. Connecting them
all are Moses and Proctor, and the relationship they have with the door is where
Welcome to Happiness puts its focus.
If this all sounds really complicated to you, that’s
because it is!
Welcome to Happiness
has this overarching message of “Everything happens for a reason,” but that
feels like unbelievably superficial advice given the traumas and tragedies that
these characters either caused or had happen to them. Death, murder, loss—all of
those feel undervalued by
Welcome to
Happiness, which has quirky characters deliver this advice about how “what’s
done is done” and “it would be disastrous to undo it.”
That mentality obviously trivializes individual pain, but
those are the kind of platitudes Welcome
to Happiness traffics in with a cherry smile. “The spider web of cause and
effect is infinite” and “Live with what you did” are some of the lines thrown
around as coping mechanisms, and by the time the film ends in a bona fide
sing-along around a campfire, Welcome to
Happiness feels like it’s settled on a simplistic self-help ideology
instead of putting in the work to advance its characters.
It’s all pretty disappointing because this cast is great:
Gallner has some manic moments toward the end that remind of his excellent turn
as Beaver in
Veronica Mars; Sexton does the same kind of tortured, wounded work
that made him a standout in the otherwise-infuriating
The Killing; and Key
brings his likeably charming self to the role of weirdo guru Parker.
But the film has so many nonsensical elements that their
acting is overshadowed: circus-like music and staging in Parker’s home; a
slow-motion sequence of people walking up a set of stairs; inescapable songs
gratingly playing in every scene (with self-important lyrics like “Society
swallows a sedative, afraid of their dreams”); and a conclusion that implies
supernatural elements but doesn’t clarify them.
At one point, Woody has to ask Niles, “I’m happy, true or
false?” and Niles replies “Does that mean you or me?” That kind of existential
wondering is what makes Welcome to
Happiness unique, but its precious approach to grief and recovery
overwhelms any nuance the script may have.
Rating:
2 out of 5 Guttenbergs
