Dir. Jill Sprecher
If you’ve ever read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, you’ll know that the book’s description of signs that appear everywhere suggests two opposite poles that are equally terrifying to the human mind: everything either happens according to some grand system or conspiracy, or everything happens out of pure randomness. 13 Conversations About One Thing ponders the horror and hope of the latter scenario. The film is about the intersecting lives of New Yorkers, searching for that elusive “one thing” of the title, happiness, or fulfillment in its various forms. For happiness is the promise of America, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and therefore the promise of America’s largest city, New York. Yet in 13 Conversations About One Thing, happiness, like the rabbit of a greyhound track, remains visible but just beyond one’s grasp.
Director Jill Sprecher populates 13 Conversations with all manner of people whose professions reduce the multiple dimensions of human life to cold, brutal facts: Gene the actuary (a resigned Alan Arkin), Troy the district attorney (Matthew McConaughey), Walker the professor of physics (John Turturro). Yet this reduction is never achievable. Walker may teach the principles of mechanics, but the quantum interactions of people - that inevitable interconnectedness - supplant any attempts at accurate predictions. Cocksure Troy’s straightforward views of the guilt of those he puts away are shattered when he is involved in a hit-and-run accident. All theories are blown out of the water when we look at people. Sometimes, things just happen, beyond systems, beyond our ken.
Sprecher mirrors the unpredictability of the worlds she depicts in the editing of the film, chopping all the stories into non-linear fragments, shuttling back and forth through time and space. And the conclusion we draw is that life is just as utterly unpredictable and unjust. You think you know what causes happiness: you think you can calm yourself by saying that lottery winners end up unhappy. But life doesn’t even out that way. Lottery winners can still keep getting lucky. And some people can find happiness in adversity - Gene fires the ever-chirpy Wade “Smiley” Bowman (William Wise), and Bowman just keeps on chirping on.
It seems randomness is the only thing you can count on. Clea DuVall gives a strong performance as Beatrice, a housekeeper who’s hit by Troy’s car. Upon her return to work after a gruelling recovery, she’s suspected of stealing a watch. Near the start of the film, Beatrice is shown crediting some form of miraculous intervention in her youth for her continued survival - yet “there is no reason” why the white shirt blew out of her hands in such a way that she would get hit by a car, and there’s no divine retribution for being maligned, just awkward silences. (Sprecher films awkwardness exquisitely, transferring the squirms from the screen to the audience.) Thus the film mounts a challenge to our expectation that films move to a proper resolution. There are no morals to the 13 conversations. These are conversations, not stories, and, in the manner of conversations, they tumble from point to point without a fixed direction.
Gene says at one point, “you gotta have faith in something”, 13 Conversations About One Thing leaves us wondering whether, in the face of randomness, you can have faith in anything. And yet fatalism, the opposite pole, does not look too happy an option. Walker has an affair with his colleague Helen (Barbara Sukowa) not out of passion and impulse, but out of what seems like a sense that this is how one attempts to find happiness. It is a profoundly resigned way of behaviour, one that hardly holds any attraction.
Ultimately, 13 Conversations About One Thing makes the case that our attempts to mediate between our selves and the world and to understand it can get in the way of happiness. That’s strong philosophy, and the strong acting of the cast helps protect the film from becoming a polemic: indeed, one could argue that the humanity in the acting is its own self-evident case for recognising the futility of applying systems to the natural world. We leave the theatre perhaps with no additional knowledge of how to be happy - but perhaps understanding that knowledge of happiness is the wrong quest to pursue. If life gives you a moment of happiness, take it.