Review of Happiness is a Journey (2022)

 The Serfs in Our Midst

Review of Happiness is a Journey

"The best artist has that thought alone which is contained within the marble shell; only the sculptor's hand can break the spell to free the figures. -Michelangelo, Letter To His Father In Florence

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.” -C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“We will have to leave this planet, and we're going to leave it, and it's going to make this planet better” -Jeff Bezos

Link to 12 Minute Film, Happiness is a Journey

Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan’s Happiness is a Journey is a quiet 12 minute film with no real dialogue and made for a budget of less than $10,000. It features a poor, ungainly, anti-celebrity, Edie “Bear” Lopez, delivering newspapers in the middle of the night. That’s it. It sounds ponderous and dreary. In the hands of lesser artists it might have been, but Lucas and Bresnan manage to give Mr. Lopez’s life the dignity and beauty it deserves. They have also made one of the most scathing indictments of the current economic system since Walker Percy and James Agee teamed up for, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the poetic documentation of depression-era dust-bowl poverty. This seemingly simple visit to a newspaper distribution plant in Texas packs the same punch as the much-ballyhooed Nomadland, the star studded feature film showcasing the harsh conditions for American’s army of transient workers. This film is a salvo against the constant drum-beat that we live in the best of times.

Lucas and Bresnan cloak their subversive narrative in classical form. This work is a masterclass in the “direct cinema” style. Starting in the late 1950s Filmmakers Richard Leacock and Robert Drew pioneered a handheld documentary approach that eschewed verbal commentary and fixed tripod set ups. Happiness is a Journey combines this form with the use of a split screen, something popular in the late 60s early 70s. Essentially the audience is given two “channels” to view the action, or lack thereof. It reenforces the feeling of witnessing a process unfolding, rather than an individual’s personal struggle. This is a film about a way of life, rather than a single story. In fact the first half of the film takes place with an ensemble of warehouse workers. This is an important introduction as we see Lopez’s journey is shared by an array of folks of varying ages, sexes races, disabilities…. They are united in the need to make twenty two cents per newspaper delivered, without any benefits.  

The filmmakers wisely chose Christmas Eve as the night to showcase the working life at the bottom of the economic rung. The atmosphere is friendly but there is no air of celebration, save some holiday cards doting the work areas. The filmmaker’s titles, occasionally appearing on top of the images,  explain that these independent contracts work 365 days a year. Holidays are an anathema to those in charge. The title of the film comes from a workspace gussied up with tchotchkes breaking the institutionalization. Amongst a collection of Monster energy drinks, gold bond powder and a black painted figurine of Bart Simpson, is a sign which reads: Happiness is a journey… not a destination.  This bromide captures the spirit of the friendly workplace where everyone, regardless of age or gender, loads and sorts.The congeniality is born of being in the same boat. Three generations of an African American family work next to an elderly white woman just down from a young man who looks like a roady for a Southern rock band. The protagonist, Mr. Lopez, wears a hillbilly beard complete with a Craftsman tool baseball hat and a Dallas Cowboys change-purse covering his neck. He wears his wealth on his hands with each finger covered with extremely large silver rings, many are adorned with skulls. He looks a decade older than his actual age of 60. His companion, a chihuahua, seems even more ancient. Both man and dog trudge through the night with determination. The grind occasionally showing through with Mr. Lopez stumbling a little on a small curb and the dog shaking in the early morning cold. Some of the co-workers are not as resilient, with one middle-aged man collapsed in a slumber on a pile of freshly sorted papers.  

The second half of the film shows Mr. Lopez making the rounds to florescent-green lit blue collar neighborhoods, drab institutions and gas stations. He stops for gas, begging the question about how many papers he must sell to fill up his pick up. The truck is an extension of Mr. Lopez’s cluttered appearance. The inside of the cab is as crowded as all the silver jewelry on his hands. Judging by the amount of stuff in the front seat it is clear there are issues with hoarding. This notion is reenforced at the end of the film where he finally arrives at his modest residence. The front area, too small to be called a lawn, is packed to the gills with things. When he opens the door a cat crawls to an assigned space amongst the debris between the gate and the trailer.  It is roughly 6AM Christmas morning and Mr. Lopez is finished until he has to get up again and arrive in the early evening at the newspaper distribution center. The final card for the film states that he has been religiously following this routine, going to work EVERY SINGLE DAY, for 21 straight years without a break. 

Those interested in defending the economic status quo would point to Lopez’ abundant material possessions as proof of his well-being. He has a decent place to live and access to calories. His vocation is his choice. This is HIS journey. This would probably be a minority opinion as most would consider decades of piecework with no benefits to be Dickensian.  Putting Mr. Lopez’s journey aside the filmmakers spent roughly half the movie showing the group, not the individual. Some might rationalize Mr. Lopez’s choices but what about the array of others? The most economically successful country in the world has at risk families, in addition to the disabled and elderly, spending Christmas working for pennies. There have always been economically disenfranchised forced to the margins to make ends meet. The genius of this film is the ordinariness that exposes the ever expanding numbers of vulnerable people. Whereas in the past this work might have been delegated to a specific group on the bottom rung, the warehouse crowd is remarkably familiar. These are people you know. And now, because of Lucas and Bresnan, you know their struggles.  Watching the quiet process of newspaper delivery, peppered by the occasional cue-card, produces an unsettling array of questions. What happens when Lopez’s pickup breaks down? Who takes care of the young child playing amongst the worker when his attentive father falls ill? What becomes of the lady in the mechanized wheel-chair when people stop buying newspapers? The answers become important as the distance between the audience and Mr. Lopez narrows. The filmmakers have captured the zeitgeist of this precarious moment by highlighting an unsung laborer with his ancient toy-dog, garish rings and friendly demeanor punching the clock 24/7. He becomes a fellow-traveller in early 21st century America, rather than a remote character in a documentary. Happiness is a Journey shows something is very wrong with the overall picture. The scenery grows bleak as we approach our destination. We might not end up on the metaphorical perpetual-loading dock, but their struggle is ours. The filmmakers aren’t making bold claims. Just bearing witness. This is a film about seeing the unseen. You won’t look at the ubiquitous newspaper vending machines the same way. That’s a good thing.