Welcome to Happiness
Studio: filmbuff
Directed by Oliver Thompson
May 20, 2016
Web Exclusive
One man dresses like a retired lighthouse keeper, another finds a hand drawn picture of a swimming cat amusing beyond all reason. Then comes rare baseball cards, children’s literature, suicide and bad chat up lines. And that’s before we even get to the central premise. Welcome to Happiness is so overloaded with dark-tinged whimsy it’s a wonder it manages to move forward at all. But it does, just about.
Now to that central premise. Children’s author Woody (Kyle Gallner), a withdrawn young man living in Moses’ (Nick Offerman) apartment, acts as the guardian of a magic door. Strangers turn up and he asks them three questions. After a little hocus-pocus with colorful stones, he locks them in his wardrobe where they enter a tiny door and presumably find happiness. It’s an unorthodox role but he seems content enough with the task. It’s when he realises the door leads to a place where bad events can be undone that he falls apart, desperate to gain entrance and fix past trauma.
To reach this understanding, and to find out what went wrong for Woody, Welcome to Happiness sure does jump around a lot first. Aside from Woody and Moses there’s new neighbor and love interest Trudy (Olivia Thirlby), suicidal artist Nyles (Brendan Sexton III), damaged collector Ripley (Josh Brener) and whatever Keegan-Michael Key and Molly C. Quinn are meant to be. Switching between them regularly, an ultimately thin plot glorying in the unexpected repercussions of each person’s actions gradually becomes clearer.
Not that it seems thin at first. There’s a lag before the flaws begin to show, writer/director Oliver Thompson offering up all his oddball characters as a distraction. It’s a trick that works well for a while until he has to return to Woody and that door. When forced to peek behind the mystery, there’s a lurch into disappointing and ill-thought through magic-realism that can’t deliver the big finish needed to unite a wacky collection of individuals and mad ideas.
For all that though, the near-constant indie soundtrack, an engaging line in personal pain from Gallner and an earnest belief in the central motto that everything happens for a reason proves oddly moving. Welcome to Happiness doesn’t consistently deliver on the title, but it has its moments.
Author rating: 6/10
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