The Pursuit of Happyness Release Date: December 15, 2006 Starring: Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Thandie Newton, Dan Castellaneta, Zuhair Haddad Directed by: Gabriele Muccino
A conventional — and at times exaggerated — meditation on the American work ethic, The Pursuit of Happyness is also a heartwarming tale of paternal affection that avoids liquefying into sentimental soup. Like its protagonist, it somehow manages succeed at just the right moments.
Will Smith, in his best performance in some years, plays Chris Gardner, a down on his luck salesman who plunges his life savings into an inventory of "bone density scanners"; medical devices that turn out to be unnecessary extravagances even for his upscale doctor clientele. His chin-uppedness guides Chris while shlepping these primitive, unsaleable machines up and down the hills of San Francisco, but the economic strain proves to be too much for his wife (an unconvincing Thandie Newton), who bails on Chris and their five year-old son Christopher (Smith's real-life son, Jaden), for a chance at a new life in New York. At the same time, a chance encounter leads Chris to try out for an unpaid internship with the brokerage firm Dean Witter. He gets it (against the odds, of course) and then makes the risky decision of staking his and Christopher's future on the slim chance that he'll be hired on full-time after the internship ends.
There's never any doubt where this film is going. You know that Chris is going to succeed in true American Dream fashion, the only question is how. Will it be through his at-times superhuman determination? At one point, he's hit by a car during his lunch break, yet brushes it off and returns to the training program. Or will it be through his persistence (jumping into the cab with his would-be boss), or winning attitude? But what offsets this predictability is the story's ability to accurately capture the absolute unpredictability of poverty. Chris gets the interview with Dean Witter, but he's arrested the day before for unpaid parking tickets. After being evicted from their apartment, Chris and Christopher manage to get a room in a by-the-week flophouse only to have the IRS yank even that away when they seize Chris' paltry bank account for back taxes.
It's not often that Hollywood is willing, or even able, to accurately dramatize what it's really like to be poor in America — to evoke not only the circumstances, but also the sense humiliation and failure. That a European director like Gabriele Muccino, helming his first English-language film, is able to capture the essence of that experience is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker. Another thing Muccino seems to inherently understand is just when to back away from the formula and prod the audience into contemplation. Every time he seems committed to ramming you full force into Horatio Alger land, he tunes down and gives you just a little bit of Tocqueville to even things out.
Most of the press on The Pursuit of Happyness has focused on the surprising performance of young Jaden Smith. And yes, the kid is really that good. What seems, in the beginning, to be a rather generic sad face rendered by an inexperienced eight year-old actor quickly morphs into a performance of surprising nuance. It may be papa that gets the Oscar nod, but Jaden may be the strongest of the two Smiths here. The real happy accident may lie in the brilliant mistake of casting father and son. When Chris looks at Christopher, it's quite obvious, though in no way overstated, that Will is looking at Jaden. And that, quite simply, just works. Unless, perhaps, your heart was forged in the polar ice caps of hell, or somesuch.
