Movie Review: The Pursuit of Happyness ***
This movie is a study in pain. Never have I felt so much pity for a lead character, nor felt so provoked to pity. Pity for the protagonist in this film is like an enticement, but instead of a siren in revealing garb, we see this man beset by adversity at every moment from every direction for two hours. In "The Pursuit of Happyness," Will Smith plays a salesman in 1981 San Francisco whom the viewer learns in time is actually an ambitious entrepreneur who thought (mistakenly) that he could make a fortune selling bone density scanners. Finding that job a dead-end prospect, he encounters a stockbroker with a sports car and decides to pursue the wealth that he imagines stockbrokers accumulate. This movie might better be called "The Pursuit of Wealth" because our hero, Chris Gardner (Smith) pursues his dream of riches to the neglect of everything else.
The way to become a stockbroker, Gardner learns, is by completing a six-month internship with Dean Witter. The internship is unsalaried and his family is already months behind in rent. His wife leaves him because she cannot take the strain of their lack of income, so he takes custody of their son. They remain behind in rent until the landlord evicts them, hesitantly, and they go to a motel. Again, the lack of payment of rent prompts the landlord to evict them and they sleep in a homeless shelter, if they are there on time to get in line. I like the portrayal of the landlords in each case: they are decent, humane, and reluctant to evict, far from the Shylock image that we often see. The night that father and son spend in a bathroom at a subway station because there was no room at the shelter is the most difficult scene to watch. Every husband or father who considers his role to be that of provider for his household will feel intense sympathy for the characters at that time. Will Smith's real-life son, Jaden, plays his son, whose part is particularly well-written. He makes the observations that kids will make, speaks the unguarded truths that children will come out with at inconvenient times, and seems not to notice the total destitution of their situation. He goes where his father tells him to go, has a bed to sleep in, and does not seem to perceive the want that they experience.
As Chris Gardner describes his life, narrating part of the film intermittently, the viewer marvels at how he coudl keep up such a hectic pace for six months. Gardner spends much of the movie running to pick up his son from daycare, to catch a bus, to get to a job interview, or to catch a homeless person in the process of stealing one of his scanners. After this display, I speculate Will Smith's next movie might be "The Jim Brown Story." Most of "The Pursuit of Happyness" describes Gardner's life as an intern in the rat race of trying to get clients for Dean Witter. There are twenty interns out of whom one will get hired at the end of six months. The brokers in charge of the interns send them on errands, including menial jobs - it is reminiscent of "Devil Wears Prada," except the stakes are ten times higher. In this case, the intern is in a position of complete desperation and has a son to support. One scene grew so desperate that I turned away from the screen - I had hit the wall, and could not take the pain of this movie anymore. At the end, Gardner gets the job and walks off into the sunset with his son, so that the viewers can breathe again. "This is what I call happiness," he tells us. Captions tell us that he made millions of dollars as a stockbroker, but nothing else. Did he reconcile with his wife? Did he marry again, or pay his landlords for the rent he owed them? What did his son (who is now thirty) end up doing as a profession? A final few minutes showing him buying a house and tucking his son into his own bed would have been nice, but family stuff is not what this movie is about. "The Pursuit of Happyness" is about getting rich, and nothing else. You might want to see it once to experience a rush of sympathy, but I might advise you to spare yourself the pain and simply be thankful that you have a roof over your head and your necessities are taken care of.
The way to become a stockbroker, Gardner learns, is by completing a six-month internship with Dean Witter. The internship is unsalaried and his family is already months behind in rent. His wife leaves him because she cannot take the strain of their lack of income, so he takes custody of their son. They remain behind in rent until the landlord evicts them, hesitantly, and they go to a motel. Again, the lack of payment of rent prompts the landlord to evict them and they sleep in a homeless shelter, if they are there on time to get in line. I like the portrayal of the landlords in each case: they are decent, humane, and reluctant to evict, far from the Shylock image that we often see. The night that father and son spend in a bathroom at a subway station because there was no room at the shelter is the most difficult scene to watch. Every husband or father who considers his role to be that of provider for his household will feel intense sympathy for the characters at that time. Will Smith's real-life son, Jaden, plays his son, whose part is particularly well-written. He makes the observations that kids will make, speaks the unguarded truths that children will come out with at inconvenient times, and seems not to notice the total destitution of their situation. He goes where his father tells him to go, has a bed to sleep in, and does not seem to perceive the want that they experience.
As Chris Gardner describes his life, narrating part of the film intermittently, the viewer marvels at how he coudl keep up such a hectic pace for six months. Gardner spends much of the movie running to pick up his son from daycare, to catch a bus, to get to a job interview, or to catch a homeless person in the process of stealing one of his scanners. After this display, I speculate Will Smith's next movie might be "The Jim Brown Story." Most of "The Pursuit of Happyness" describes Gardner's life as an intern in the rat race of trying to get clients for Dean Witter. There are twenty interns out of whom one will get hired at the end of six months. The brokers in charge of the interns send them on errands, including menial jobs - it is reminiscent of "Devil Wears Prada," except the stakes are ten times higher. In this case, the intern is in a position of complete desperation and has a son to support. One scene grew so desperate that I turned away from the screen - I had hit the wall, and could not take the pain of this movie anymore. At the end, Gardner gets the job and walks off into the sunset with his son, so that the viewers can breathe again. "This is what I call happiness," he tells us. Captions tell us that he made millions of dollars as a stockbroker, but nothing else. Did he reconcile with his wife? Did he marry again, or pay his landlords for the rent he owed them? What did his son (who is now thirty) end up doing as a profession? A final few minutes showing him buying a house and tucking his son into his own bed would have been nice, but family stuff is not what this movie is about. "The Pursuit of Happyness" is about getting rich, and nothing else. You might want to see it once to experience a rush of sympathy, but I might advise you to spare yourself the pain and simply be thankful that you have a roof over your head and your necessities are taken care of.
posted by Bountyhawk at 9:29 AM
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