The Pursuit of Happyness
Directed by Gabriele Muccino
Written by Steven Conrad
Starring Will Smith, Thandie Newton and Jaden Smith
Classification: PG
Rating: **
One of the more depressing would-be uplifting movies in some time, The Pursuit of Happyness is based on the real-life story of Chris Gardner, a San Francisco salesman who found himself homeless and jobless with little education in the early eighties. Against immense odds, he eventually became a wealthy man.
In this slightly fictionalized version of his life, we see Gardner (Will Smith, with eighties sideburns and facial hair) struggling with a previous bad financial decision, trying to sell overpriced and probably unnecessary portable bone scanners to doctors. His wife (Thandie Newton, in a thankless role) is working two shifts at her job to support his folly. Finally, she can't take it any more and leaves him and their adorable five-year-old son (played by Smith's own child, Jaden Smith). A single parent without a car, home or job, Chris ends up living in a homeless shelter while serving an unpaid six-month internship at the brokerage firm of Dean Witter Reynolds, where he hopes to beat out 20 other candidates for a job.
The movie's oddly spelled title comes from a phrase scrawled on the door of the crappy daycare where Gardner parks his son each day. The subject pops up in Gardner's occasional voice-over ruminations, marking out chapters of his life en route to the American dream. He spends most of the movie in one form of pursuit or another, dodging cars as he races from appointment to appointment (the running scenes feel like an attempt to add some Hollywood pizzazz to the general tedium of poverty). He dashes from doctors' offices where he continues trying to unload the scanners, to potential brokerage clients, to his office and to the homeless shelter where he must check in by 5, or he and his child will spend the night in a public washroom. Bathing himself in sinks, Chris still shows up looking spiffy at work each day, the embodiment of the salesman as smiling confidence man.
For an expensive, mainstream Hollywood movie, The Pursuit of Happyness is crisscrossed with mixed motives. The writer is Steven Conrad (who explored similar downbeat material in The Weather Man), and the movie is directed by Italian Gabriele Muccino ( The Last Kiss), making his English-language debut, who seems determined to make San Francisco look blandly picturesque, even when shooting lines of homeless people. Smith's ambition may be obvious: a desire to be taken seriously in a part that demands more than the wise-cracking that has served him well in action movies ( Bad Boys, Men in Black) and romantic comedies ( Hitch). But Gardner is yet another engaging hustler, dancing and joking for the white bosses and potential investors.
Both Smith and his son are appealing presences, but The Pursuit of Happyness seems to take place in a sociological vacuum. Gardner's insight into his difficulties begins and ends with the thought that, in the pursuit of happiness, there's a lot more pursuit involved than happiness, and unasked political questions seem to dangle ominously over the entire movie. Imagine remaking The Grapes of Wrath with a happy ending: Instead of Tom Joad wrapping up the movie with a speech about the plight of the oppressed, he suddenly announces that he's invented a new peach-picking machine that will make him filthy rich.
Liam Lacey