If this rags-to-riches tale wasn’t true, you’d think it was the invention of the world’s sappiest motivational speaker. Chris Gardner, penniless and homeless in the early 1980s, remained committed to caring for his young son while working toward a career as a stockbroker. It’s stuff tailor-made for an inspirational Hollywood flick, and it is a story told with skill in The Pursuit of Happyness.
Will Smith deservedly earned an Oscar nomination (and didn’t even throw punches at the awards show) as Gardner. We meet him eking out a living by selling overpriced bone-density scanners to physicians in the San Francisco Bay area. His wife, Linda (Thandiwe Newton), is pulling double-shifts at a laundry, but the couple’s expenses continue to mount – not the least of which is the Chinatown daycare center, Happyness, where they leave their son, Christopher, (Smith’s real-life son Jaden Smith), during the week.
Then Chris sees what might be his way out of poverty. On a sales call he meets a man climbing out of a cherry-red sportscar. Chris has two questions for the stranger: What does he do and how does he do it? The man readily answers that he’s a stockbroker, and that you don’t necessarily even need a college degree to do it. Chris is hooked. He finagles a meeting with an executive at Dean Witter, where he impresses by quickly solving a Rubik’s cube. Along the way, Chris charms his way into snagging an unpaid internship that might – might – eventually lead to a paying gig.
Linda isn’t so impressed. She promptly packs her things and leaves Chris to raise their son alone. Things go from bad to very, very bad. Chris is thrown in jail for delinquent parking tickets. His bone-density scanners are stolen. He and his boy are evicted. He is hit by a car. He is forced to eat at soup kitchens and stay at homeless shelters and even, in a particularly harrowing scene, a public restroom in a BART subway station.
Scripted by Steve Conrad, The Pursuit of Happyness is buoyed by one very important caveat: We know that ultimately things turn out well for Chris. Will Smith’s voiceover narration as Chris might seem superfluous on occasion, but it adds a dimension of distance and perspective to the misery that unfolds onscreen, and it helps buttress some of the more gut-wrenching moments.
One of the picture’s more unique aspects is also its most refreshing. Movies are rife with tearjerkers in which good people are kicked and beaten down by life, but Pursuit of Happyness offers us a likable, self-assured protagonist (ahh, those wistful days of nice guy Will Smith) who is relatively free of self-pity. Chris Gardner weathers periods of darkness and desperation, but he has a Dickensian resilience. He remains committed to his son and to himself.
Will Smith pours his considerable charm into the role. Not surprisingly, there is also a palpable chemistry in the onscreen father-son relationship. Director Gabriele Muccino wisely focuses on heightening audience identification with Chris. Only occasionally does Muccino pull away to place his hero’s journey in a larger context, letting us glimpse the sea of homeless in the San Francisco of the Reagan era. How many other Chris Gardners are in that sea of humanity?
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 