HAPPINESS RUNS -- for its life -- in Adam Sherman's based-on-truth tale

Maybe it has to do with TrustMovies' advancing years, but he does wonder if there can be anyone out there past the age of, say, 35 who does not realize that would-be Utopian communities -- particularly those run by out-of-touch, elderly hippies with drug-and-other problems -- are not the best places to raise healthy children.  Really?  You had no idea?  Then do see HAPPINESS RUNS and revel in its revelations.

So much sex and sin -- and so soon, too! -- are packed into this 88-minute movie that it's little wonder characterization comes up a bit short. You may also begin to miss getting to know a character or two who possesses even a marginally conventional life.  Teenage sex, group sex, heavy-duty drugs, the commune slut: they're all here but appear to offer so little enjoyment that you begin to wonder why sex 'n sin have that don't-miss-'em reputation.

There is also a scene of cow torching -- cow torching?! -- (Yes: and those are the flames, at left) which just might be the event that turns the corner for this woeful little movie made by a fellow named Adam Sherman (shown above) and which is reportedly based upon his own life growing up in just such a commune.  I don't envy Mr. Sherman his experience, and I wished I had liked his movie better.  But it really has nothing to say, save the utterly expected, and there are no full-bodied characters on view, either -- just a catalog of unhealthy quirks parading about in the skin of some relatively attractive actors.

I suspect that the writer/director is simply too close to his material to achieve much objectivity.  He tries to blend fantasy with reality, and his camera does capture the dry-yet-green, firetrap-laden landscape you find in the hills (shown below) that rise from the Pacific Ocean, where I assume the film was shot.  Much of  the dialog has the sound of on-the-spot improvisation -- which only adds to the weird feeling of off-the-cuff DIY film-making.

The director also gifts us with that de rigeuer shot of fast-moving clouds.  What is this for, I must ask?  The first time (or twenty) that I saw this kind of shot, a decade or more ago, it seemed new and interesting.  Now it's standard and boring.  But what it is meant to suggest?  Is it the new-fangled way to showing us time passing -- as did those 1940s and 50s shots of calendar pages turning in the breeze?  Or does it simply remain a now-standard trope that shows us that the director and his cinematographer know how to be not-quite au courant?  Please, somebody, post a comment and explain to me the significance of the fast-moving clouds shot.

While I believe that growing up in such a sad and desolate place (as this commune apparently was) has resulted in what we see, it can't have always been like that.  Communes sprang up in part as a reaction to the continued conformity of post-WWII America, and, from the documentaries and narratives we've already seen, these places seemed to offer something new and vital, for awhile at least.  Because Sherman shows us the end of the line, without a hint of anything good in either his parents or the place itself, he manages to alienate his viewers very nearly as much as he himself has been alienated.

The cast is as good as this highly circumspect material permits. Among the youngsters, only Shiloh Fernandez (from the exquisitely nasty DeadGirl) was recognizable to me.  But, according to the IMDB, he wasn't even in this movie. (Maybe he's decided to leave it off his resume?)  The saddest part of Happiness Runs comes from seeing once-capable actors -- Rutger Hauer (above, center, the commune's elderly-but-still-randy "spiritual" leader) and Andie MacDowell (as our hero's mom, below, who evidently supplies financing for the commune) -- wasted in utterly thankless roles.  When, toward the film's conclusion, Ms MacDowell tosses her cookies, this seems the only logical reaction to all that has gone before.

Happiness Runs, from Strand Releasing, opens this Friday, May 7, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and then in Los Angeles on May 14 at the Laemmle Sunset 5.