Thirteen Conversations About One Thing

Released 2001
Stars Matthew McConaughey, Alan Arkin, John Turturro, Clea DuVall, Amy Irving, Barbara Sukowa, Tia Texada
Directed by Jill Sprecher

Happiness is the subject of "13 Conversations About One Thing." For that matter, happiness is the subject of every conversation we ever have: the search for happiness, the envy of happiness, the loss of happiness, the guilt about undeserved happiness. The engine that drives the human personality is our desire to be happy instead of sad, entertained instead of bored, inspired instead of disillusioned, informed rather than ignorant. It is not an easy business.

The movie finds connections between people who think they are strangers, finding the answer to one person's problem in the question raised by another. We meet Walker (John Turturro), a sardonic college professor, who walks out on his wife (Amy Irving) and begins an affair with a woman (Barbara Sukowa). She realizes that the affair is hardly the point: Walker is going through the motions because he has been told, and believes, that this is how you find happiness. We also meet a house cleaner (Clea DuVall) who is good at her job but works for a client who can only criticize. She is injured for no reason at all, suffers great pain, does not deserve to.

The truth hidden below the surface of the story is a hard one: Nothing makes any sense. We do not get what we deserve. If we are lucky, we get more. If we are unlucky, we get less. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. That's the system. All of our philosophies are a futile attempt to explain it.

Summary by Roger Ebert

Jill and Karen Sprecher, who wrote this screenplay, really seem to hate life. Their characters in this movie struggle to find some form of happiness, but mostly they only become more disillusioned and unhappy. I just wanted to shake some of these people and tell them to quit whining. It's as if they operate under the assumption that life is supposed to fair. If there's one thing I know, it's that life is not fair. I don't know who started that rumor, but it's not true. We should all try to be fair with other people, but we can't expect others to be fair with us. If we could, we wouldn't need lawyers.

The movie is philosophical. It's interesting in that respect, but it's such a downer! I enjoy sad, painful movies, but this isn't one of those. This is more like having that co-worker from down the hall stop in your office to moan about everything that's going wrong for him--but in an interesting way. I have to stress that it's interesting, because I gave it three stars, but everything I've said is negative. I don't want to make it sound like it's a bad film, because it's not. It's a good film, but one of my peeves is watching movies about characters who try to dissect life six ways to Sunday. Life is what it is; it's what you make of it. Deal with it.

One of the things the movie stresses is you can control your actions, but you can't control what happens to you. What it boils down to is how you react to external events determines whether you're happy. Everyone talks about luck, but there really isn't such a thing. Luck is a way to describe external events, but we make our own luck. If we put ourselves into situations where good things can happen for us and try to avoid bad situations, we raise the probability that well have "good luck." The other component to luck is how we react to external events. If we're whiners and moaners, we're always going to have "bad luck" and will be unhappy. If we optimistically look on the bright side of things, people will perceive us as lucky, and we'll probably be happy. Most people fall in the middle, but the movie gives us two extremes in Wade (William Wise) and Gene (Alan Arkin). This is a perfect illustration of how we make our own happiness. No one, least of all Gene, benefits from him being such a miserable bastard, but everyone benefits from Wade being so upbeat. There's a nice scene where the two accidentally meet in the coffee shop, and we know Wade is having a hard time. He can't find work, and he hasn't even told his wife he's been fired. Still, he offers to buy Gene a cup of coffee and compliments him on being a good manager. Although Wade couldn't control being laid off, he continues to be positive. As a result, Gene recommends him for a job, and "lucky" Wade lands on his feet. The older I get, the more I realize life really does work this way, and I strive to be more like Wade. --Bill Alward, January 13, 2003