Actress Hosts Screening for Simon Pegg's New Movie
EAST HAMPTON—When reduced to its basest idea, Gwyneth Paltrow's website Goop is all about the search for happiness, right? Whether it's through a trip to Missoula, Mont., with a $660 Isabel Marant striped blanket coat, or making spinach salad with spiced pecans, lamb bacon, Clemson blue cheese and bourbon vinaigrette.
But that's not the reason Ms. Paltrow hosted a screening of "Hector and the Search for Happiness" at the East Hampton Cinema on Monday night. The film's star Simon Pegg, who has appeared in such movies as "Shaun of the Dead," "Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol" and as Scotty in the recent "Star Trek" reboots, is the godfather to Apple, AAPL -0.65% Ms. Paltrow's daughter with Coldplay singer Chris Martin. (In turn, Mr. Martin is the godfather of Mr. Pegg's daughter, Matilda.)
"He's become the biggest movie star in our family," Ms. Paltrow told a crowd that included her mother Blythe Danner, her fitness guru Tracy Anderson, her husband Mr. Martin, and her friends Nacho Figueras and Delfina Blaquier.
"I hope you take something home," Mr. Pegg chimed in. "Not from the cinema, but from the movie."
In the film, which will be released in September and is based on a novel by François Lelord, Mr. Pegg plays Hector, a London-based psychiatrist who has grown disenchanted with the humdrum repetition of his humdrum life, including his patients, his daily wheatgrass shot and his slightly mothering girlfriend ( Rosamund Pike ). He sets off on an "Eat Pray Love"-like quest to better understand happiness.
He finds it in such moments as helping a monk install a satellite dish, eating sweet-potato stew with a family in Africa, and aiding a dying woman with a brain tumor on a flight to Los Angeles. Can you guess if he ends up happy or not?
As if the messages in the film weren't clear enough, the director, Peter Chelsom —who also made "Serendipity" with Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack and "Hannah Montana: The Movie"—has Hector underline them by writing aphorisms across the screen as his epiphanies occur.
They include: "Fear is an impediment to happiness," "Happiness could be the freedom to love more than one woman at the same time," and "Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story."
These aphorisms don't—but perhaps should—include, especially for this crowd, "Happiness is staying in the Hamptons during the week," "Happiness is not having had to pay to see a movie about happiness," "Happiness is getting the nanny to take care of your children while you're out on a Monday night," "Happiness is the ability to consciously uncouple and recouple," and "Happiness is an afterparty with an open bar and passed hors d'oeuvres."
Following the film, Ms. Paltrow, Messrs. Martin and Pegg, and the rest of the evening's guests retired to Serena and Lily, a home store in nearby Wainscott for a reception. There was a lot of talk about happiness, of course.
Mr. Pegg, for instance, looked happy chatting with executives from the film company Relativity, even though he had just flown into the Hamptons from a vacation in Greece via London.
"That kind of travel, I wouldn't say it makes me happy," said Mr. Pegg. "But it's all part of the process. Life's a whirlwind."
Making the film, he added, helped him consolidate his own ideas of happiness. "It proved to me you have to know every emotion to understand happiness. You have to know misery."
Mr. Chelsom said that writing the movie was a particularly happy experience. Directing it wasn't as happy. "But I grow fonder about it as I look back," he said.
He was chatting with Fabiola Beracasa and her husband, Jason Beckman, who are planning to go to Ibiza this week with their son. That sounded happy.
Mr. Figueras and Ms. Blaquier happily enjoyed the movie. "But I always have fun," said the polo player. "I'm a happy guy."
Just looking at the cute housewares in the store, we're sure, made at least a few people with and without buckets of disposable income pretty happy.
"Of course people can find happiness here," said the shop's co-owner, Lily Kanter. "People like stuff."
