'From Stress to Happiness' - Movie Review

A stressed Argentinian film-maker (director Alejandro De Grazia) meets several leading experts on happiness. The two most notable were David Steindl-Rast and Matthieu Ricard, a pair of intriguing guys who the movie suggests were brought to Argentina for a retreat/trip arranged by De Grazia's wife? The cinematography varies between decent (some of the scene shots from their trip to Patagonia) and terrible: jittery shooting of Ricard with a camera person who appeared to be a plebe with a cellphone who had no clue that her/his footage would end up in a Netflix production ... including Ricard dropping entirely out of frame occasionally. I think what happened was that De Grazia was so impressed with Ricard that he made an after-the-fact decision to make a movie out of the footage he had ... but he had no footage of Ricard because he was sitting right next to him meditating.

The biggest problem for me is that while it's a charming basic intro to Buddhist philosophy, that's a path I've been on for 25 years. I have no doubt that several days with Ricard was an effective introduction, but an hour in a movie has little effect. The influence and feelings are very hard to convey in a movie, as is the philosophy.