The question is relevant because it’s a tale of a man’s success, an American strapping-on-your-boot-to-climb-a-mountain. It’s also a question the film itself indirectly raises. At one point in the movie, Gardner’s five-year-old son tells that old story about a man trapped by a flood who turned away boaters, saying each time that God would save him. After dying in that flood, he asked God in heaven why he didn’t save him and God says, “I sent you two boats!”

Perhaps that story, and its inclusion in the film, can be seen as an anti-God stance. “God’s not going to save you, you fool, you have to save yourself.” But I don’t think the filmmakers of Happyness intended it that way. They made a film about looking for the boats God’s already sent to save us.

Sometimes it may not be the boat we want. I’m sure Gardner didn’t want his wife to leave him and to have to shuttle his son from homeless shelter to shelter. Sometimes it may seem an impossible boat to ride. When Gardner accepts his non-paying internship at Dean Witter, he’s one of dozens. The odds against him being the one they hire are impossible. And sometimes the boat might just require too much damn work on our part to want to board it. When Gardner’s last medical machine breaks down (selling them is his only source of income), he sells his blood to buy the fuse to fix it.

The point of the movie is: God sends the boats. The question is: can we see it for what it is and do we have the courage, faith, and dedication to climb on?

Some reviewers read this story as a parable in self-actualization, in an individual triumphing on his own. But I don’t think the filmmakers see it that way. The last words of the film are, “I build a fence around you in a father’s way.” These are the last lyrics of the last song heard as the credits end.

It’s an obvious parallel to the film. Gardner builds a fence around his son throughout the film, protecting him against all. But I took it in a spiritual way. God built a fence around Gardner—providing the machines to sell to keep creditors at bay, helping him find those machines when they were lost, giving him the courage to smile after endless rejection, giving him the Rubik’s cube, giving him the opportunity at Witter. Gardner had to do the work—considerable work. He had to endure the hardest conditions.

My heavenly father builds a fence around me in a father’s way. Personal story. I just left a front desk job at a hotel where my bosses criticized me for watching movies and refused to give me health insurance (unlike their other twenty employees). With a pregnant wife getting in a car accident and young children at home getting sick and injured, I cried out to God. A week later, I was hired to manage a video store where it’s a job requirement to watch movies all day and where they’re providing health insurance for me and my family. And that’s just a recent story.

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