Great Movie: 13 Conversations About One Thing

It is very easy to make a movie about happiness. It is very tempting to sermonize to take life a moment at a time and take nothing for granted. Not that such an approach or such an intention is to be dismissed off as just dumbing it down for the audience or being afraid to be realistic. We often see film makers start with characters who are radical, but we can see them disappointingly shy away from letting their characters' lives take turns that would have been inevitable for them if they existed in a real world. They redeem these characters from themselves and their demons for a happy ending or to endear them to the audience. Take "As good as it gets" for example. In that movie, Jack Nicholson is a man who in real life can never have a relationship, thanks to the 765320462 insults he manages to throw at anyone he meets, in just a couple of minutes. People like these, the victims of their own mentalities can never afford to have another person sympathize for them even if they themselves painfully try to not be themselves. But the audience love such transformations and miracles, and thats what tempts filmmakers to trade off their movie's reality for popular appeal. While critics might express their disappointment, people feel rewarded for the dose of assurance they get that hope wins and everything will be alright in life, anyway. Of-course I am sure that the cinematic-climax of "As good as it gets" is responsible for the public appeal and acceptance of an otherwise depressing film.

This is the reason why I liked, appreciated and fell in love with this film "13 Conversations about one thing". The theme of the movie is "Happiness", and the story (if it can be called a story) is about how happiness plays with humans. May be happiness has no intention of playing with our lives, but we are so hellbent on being happy all the time and dismiss off any other state of mind as being robbed off by life. "Happiness is not the norm" say some yogis, whose logic is that all the feelings including happiness, grief, sorrow, anger and sadness are more or less the ripples of the waves the activity of life creates (and thus they convince that crest follows trough). But man always prefers to be smiling, happy, successful, loved, warm and beautiful. And this expectation is what makes life so disappointing and confusing, given the way life presents itself as the time given to man to do what he wants to do. That's what this movie discusses.

We meet several characters in this film all of whom have one and only one obvious goal, happiness. We meet a lawyer in a bar( Matthew McConaughey) who celebrates his victory with booze and is in no mood to give "Luck" its due acknowledgement and even dismisses if off as a sorry excuse of losers. He argues with a pessimist that life is not as complicated as they say and that conscious actions and decisions govern the outcomes we enjoy or suffer, and nothing more or less than that. It is not very surprising to see someone who is enjoying the privilege of getting what they deserve from life, completely dismiss the impact of things that are not in an individual's control and yet manage to change his game. Ironically, he on his way home hits a girl and seriously injures her and presumes she is dead. He helplessly watches his own life being shred to pieces and is painfully made to observe the powerlessness of his decisions or the order that he presumes is in the world, to redeem him from the claws of fate. What does this imply? Nothing. That's why I liked this movie.

In another story, we come across a girl who tells her friend how she is saved from death and how that made her think that there is a reason why she is given a second chance. She talks about a vision she had when she was drowning, and it all sounds convincing to her till she gets hit by Matthew McConnaughey's car. Her life is pushed back to years and she cannot do anything about it, except to try in vain to find a "reason" behind this. What does it imply? Nothing. There are some other characters and events in this film that present different journeys and stories but no conclusions can be made from their stories.

There is no message conveyed here, no redemption arrived at, no meaning of life found out. What does this film portray? Reality. The way man cons himself to believe that it all makes sense in someway or the other. Good people suffer, and bad people prosper, and not much can one do to prevent it. People who are happy till then, will be turned upside down suddenly and lose so much. They might manage to crawl back to where they have been pushed away from but so many years will be blown off from their lives, and they do not stand there with any compensation except with a lesson that they presume life taught them. I never came across a man who made use of a "lesson" that life taught them, for any substantial achievement. I know an old man who is cheated by his friends and is taken advantage of. He used to tell me that life taught him never to trust anyone, but he never again had money enough to use that precaution, neither did he live long after that. The "lesson" that he thought life taught him, proved to be a lesson that could have benefited if had not been taught. In other words, not a lesson at all.

The movie presents the world around us, as it is. There are lucky people, who get parties from life. There are not so lucky people who are denied things but who work and manage to get what they are not given. And then there are unlucky people who try but not succeed. There are people from whom everything is taken away, just as they begin to appreciate it. There are people for whom it is impossible even to try. Yes, and a million other cases exist. Some guys believe that there is a higher consciousness sitting above the clouds that takes the responsibility of managing who should get what. And some comment that no such entity exists and that if it is true it should be despised for its sadism rather than being looked at with reverence.

Films like these might  be hard to digest for those who share "Life is Beautiful" wallpapers and "Keep Smiling" quotes on Facebook, but I saw very few films that came as close to the reality of life. The director chooses to capture the game rather than trying to drive it. Rather than telling fairy tales about happiness it just makes us look at life as we should. Not with reverence, or not with despise but with an acknowledgement of the sense that no matter how it is, our only option is to deal with it and carry forward. May be not all who watch this movie might agree with me. "You didn't get it, idiot" they might say. But whats important is, it makes us have our own conclusion, by not giving a conclusion. Long live great cinema.