After seeing a cut of Legend of the Happy Worker, executive producer David Lynch told its director and his longtime friend and collaborator, Duwayne Dunham, “It’s Disney on acid.” This moment will go down in lore among the other memorable Lynch anecdotes, like the one on the set of Blue Velvet, when actor Dennis Hopper told Lynch the word he was refusing to read from his own screenplay was “fuck”.
Ironically, Dunham’s adaptation of S.E. Feinberg’s play dates back to 1986’s Blue Velvet, the first of two feature films Dunham would cut for Lynch, the second being 1991’s Wild at Heart. Dunham would also direct and edit episodes from the original run of Twin Peaks and edit the entirety of Twin Peaks: The Return.
Upon finishing Blue Velvet, Lynch gave Dunham the script for Legend of the Happy Worker and told him, “If I make it, I’ll just make it weird. If you make it with your sensibilities, you might turn it into something.” At the time, Dunham was still a young filmmaker, and Lynch’s confidence left a lasting impression. So, after nearly 40 years of trying, and with help from Lynch to source the financing, Dunham, along with his co-writers S.E. Feinberg and Jerold Pearson, has created a film that is extremely quirky if not an alternative Lynchian weirdness.
Champion Goose (Thomas Hayden Church) begins digging a hole in the American desert with his gold-plated “What Now?” shovel. Give or take 105 years, and that little hole has become a large-scale operation, overseen by Champion Goose III (Thomas Hayden Church). When Joe (Josh Whitehouse) approaches his employer with the question of ‘Why?’, He is told the story about the short-order cook and the goat. He doesn’t get an answer to his question. Instead, to his surprise, he’s promoted.
Goose prides himself on the happiness of his men and, like his grandfather and father before him, he is in no rush. So, when Cleat Anderson (Colm Meaney), a former worker, returns to try and sell Goose heavy machinery to dig faster, his offer is rejected. Goose tells him that here, they don’t use ratios, they use heart, soul, and shovels. However, Goose was warned a man like Cleat would one day come and Joe, the young nephew, is ripe for manipulation once the old-timer is out of the way.
Opening with the onscreen inscription, “A fable for our time…” Dunham and his co-writers pare the story back, keeping it as simple as possible. Legend of the Happy Worker is unabashedly a message-oriented film, and its focus, like other fables and parables, is to deliver it in the least complicated way.
The message here is about not losing oneself and being self-aware of the responsibility we have towards other people. However, in our hyper-politicised, complicated, and troubling present day, Dunham’s film might not be quite so simple, and perhaps it was never going to be. Whether the direct intention of Dunham and his co-writers, their Disney-esque comedy takes a political stand when Goose tells Cleat that his grandfather loved Indians, and should he himself encounter one, he’d offer that man a job and a future.
Legend of the Happy Worker pushes back against not only the current Trump Administration but the generic and derogatory view of the “other”. Unlike in contemporary political rhetoric, there’s no fear in Goose’s voice, only the conviction of love and compassion for his fellow man. This could be dismissed as a coincidence were it not for other politicised aspects. Cleat’s violent and manipulative tactics to force his worldview on others are an echo of our hyper-politicised reality, where choice and free will clash with dictatorial ideologies.
It’s no coincidence that there’s a Disney-esque vibe to Legend of the Happy Worker, given that Dunham has directed Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993) and Ready to Run (2000) for Disney. Parts of its fantasy soundtrack also nurture a fairy-tale-esque energy, especially when accompanying the silhouette of a worker against the full moon, hunched over, digging. This one moment recalls that, as much as fairy tales can be romantic and uplifting, they are also weighed down by sadness and anguish.
Legend of the Happy Worker is a colorful and vibrant world filled with larger-than-life personalities. Dunham encourages these heightened performances from his actors, and they are a joy to watch. Meaney goes big and wild, chewing the scenery as though he has an insatiable appetite. He shows his nuance as a performer, layering in a few subtler and quieter moments to ground Cleat. Church delivers a breathtaking performance full of quips that position him as the beating heart of the film.
In contrast, Whitehouse’s performance is interesting because he conveys a man in touch with his inner child, an eternally happy and contented individual. His character is a natural babyface, and when Joe turns heel, it feels like he’s playing at being the villain, which weakens the story’s dark turn.
The love Dunham, his cast, and crew have for the material shows throughout. It would take a person with a heart of stone not to get swept up in its outpouring of emotion, even if it can be excessively sentimental and saccharine. What Legend of the Happy Worker also clearly carries in its soul is Dunham’s love for cinema and storytelling.
Legend of the Happy Worker should feel world’s apart from Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West. Stylistically different, they are, however, in direct conversation with one another. In Leone’s film, civilization is expanding westward and is driving out a way of life the characters knew, threatening their place in the world. In Legend of the Happy Worker, machinery and technology are also a threat. However, here, the sentimental, saccharine and romanticized fairy-tale-esque world view leads to a more optimistic fate.
At its heart, Dunham’s film is a familiar and beloved story about good versus evil. Mixed with some of the western genre’s colour-coding tropes, from Goose’s white horse to Cleat’s black hat, Dunham creates a larger-than-life sensibility by inferring a duel between God and the Devil for a man’s soul, on which rides a greater fate. Forty years in the making, Dunham shows his ambitions for the story, which finds a way to sneakily present itself as deceptively simple, when it’s anything but.