Happiness

Just as there is no secret to happiness in life, neither is there any one secret to conjuring happiness itself on the movie screen. Sometimes you only see happiness for a split second, like Jeff Bridges as The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” listening to CCR in his car and tapping in time on the roof, and sometimes it takes the whole movie to effuse it, as happens in Aaron Katz’s masterpiece “Cold Weather” when you realize in the last shot along with the character on the screen that happiness has been, as it is sometimes said, the whole journey up to this concluding destination. Sometimes happiness is summoned in a flash by an actor, as Ashley Judd summoned it in “The Locusts” when her character thanks Jeremy Davies’s character for a dance, and sometimes it is suffused on screen by the director, as it was by Michael Mann in “Miami Vice” when Colin Farrell and Gong Li are speedboating off to Cuba for mojitos and the wind is whipping in their hair, and Patti LaBelle and Moby are on the soundtrack, and Mann frames it so the sky and ocean seem to stretch out forever to bring to life that old idiom: the world is their oyster (or, their Cuban highball). And sometimes happiness on screen blurs with happiness off screen as it did in “To Have and Have Not” when Lauren Bacall’s Slim shows Humphrey Bogart’s Steve how to whistle and when he smiles, the fourth wall ineffably dissolves, and you can no longer tell the difference between Bogey and Steve. 

When I read that Brenda Fricker died on July 16th, aged 81, in her hometown of Dublin, I immediately went looking on YouTube for one scene in “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” It’s the scene when Charlie MacKenzie (Mike Myers) is going to see his parents, Stuart MacKenzie (Mike Myers, again) and May (Fricker), to watch a soccer match. It’s a Saturday night, and we know this because director Thomas Schlamme calls up The Bay City Rollers’ 1974 song with the sixth day of the week for its title. The number one hit is diegetic because we see Stuart moving in rhythm to it as he tends his Scottish Wall of Fame and because we see May grooving to it as she enters stage right and gets a beer from the mini-fridge and because then we see Stuart and May lock arms in a do-si-do. 

There is a feeling to a Saturday night that can’t really be put into words, or that I can’t really put into words, I should say, no matter how many times I have tried, though The Bay City Rollers, bless their hearts, captured it and in their do-si-doing to it, Fricker and Myers capture it too, a brief flash of absolute satisfaction with life.