Legend of the Happy Worker (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for anachronisms
Take a Drink: whenever Colm Meany vamps
Take a Drink: for ‘getting the boot’
Do a Shot: for literally ‘getting the boot’
Do a Shot: for turtles
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
While it had been decades since David Lynch directed a film, he would dabble in executive producing those of others. No other film than this Locarno Film Festival premiere from Duwayne Dunham, his editor on Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, was his last.
Legend of the Happy Worker is a self-styled fairy tale set somewhere awfully nearby to Monument Valley, where Thomas Haden Church has set up a hole-digging enterprise (could be a mine, not terribly clear) that happily employs hundreds of happy little hole-diggers who go home to their happy little families every day. Josh Whitehouse (from The Knight Before Christmas!) plays one such digger- at least until he asks one important question- ‘why?’
A Toast
From the first scenes, you’ll realize you’ve been transported to a thoroughly goofy alternate world, one that plays like an amalgam of Wild Wild West and Pleasantville. It’s the little details, like Church’s giant whiskey barrels in his office, or how we leap ahead 50-odd years when we enter Whitehouse’s home, or when somebody finally ‘gets the boot’. Surprising (although not particularly Lynchian) choices abound, making the film consistently entertaining.
Entertainment isn’t the only goal- there’s an economic parable here. Not always a coherent one (see below), but one that is sufficiently developed that it never loses your interest trying to determine the lessons it wants to impart.
A final thumbs up to the performances, especially Thomas Haden Church’s, which is full of cornpone aphorisms and an innate sturdy conservative decency as the White Hat across from Colm Meaney’s smarmy Black Hat.
Beer Two
Legend of the Happy Worker is maybe too goofy at times- feature-length is a long time to stay in this comic register. Also, all of the green-screen was assuredly a necessary evil, but perhaps overapplied at times.
Beer Three
The film also has a bit of a muddled message- are we supposed to be differentiating good Capitalists vs bad Capitalists? Are bad Capitalists the ones that automate?
At times it seems to be advising not to ask ‘why’, or not to worry yourself overmuch with the answer, and definitely don’t dream of a world outside your own. The big ending speech contradicts that, but it wouldn’t be hard to come away from the preceding plot details with such an impression.
Verdict
Legend of the Happy Worker is a uniquely engaging and thought-provoking Western tall tale of class and economic struggle.
