Victor (Mark L. Young) learns quite a lesson in HAPPINESS RUNS
HAPPINESS RUNS (Adam Sherman, 2008)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, May 7
212-255-8800
www.quadcinema.com
www.strandreleasing.com
Inspired by his own childhood raised on a commune, Adam Sherman’s debut film, HAPPINESS RUNS, is filled with angst and ennui, overwhelmed by a dank darkness that very nearly strangles it. Mark L. Young stars as Victor, a high school senior living in a utopian — dystopian? — community where sex and drugs run rampant, among the kids as well as the adults, which include Victor’s incompetent mother (Andie MacDowell) and Insley (Rutger Hauer), the local guru who heals his flock by sleeping with all the women he can. When the prodigal daughter, the beloved and beautiful Becky (Hanna Hall), returns to care for her ailing father, followed by ultracool drug dealer Shiloh (Shiloh Fernandez, looking frighteningly like Joaquin Phoenix), life in this supposedly idyllic setting threatens to explode as greed, jealousy, and violence turn the not-so-free-spirited commune into LORD OF THE FLIES. HAPPINESS RUNS, which has its moments, suffers from the lack of an attractive protagonist; everyone appears to be so miserable that it is difficult to identify with any of them. In his song “Happiness Runs,” ’60s icon Donovan sings, “You can have everything if you let yourself be”; in his first movie, HAPPINESS RUNS, Adam Sherman shows that that is not necessarily always the case.