The Pursuit of Happyness

Posted by Clayton L. White (stinky_booties@hotmail.com) on March 18, 2007

The Pursuit of Happyness is the American debut of Italian director Gabriele Muccino (the original Last Kiss), and he’s proven that he’ll probably have a decent career in Hollywood, if he can continue to churn out more sugary tripe like this film. Based on a true story about a man named Chris Gardner, the film is entertaining almost in spite of itself. Will Smith plays Gardner, a man who can’t seem to catch a break. He sells portable bone density scanners in San Francisco circa 1981. He and his family are barely making ends meet. His wife is played by Thandie Newton, and his son is played by Smith’s own son, Jaden. To be honest, Newton is laughably bad. I mean, she is horrible. Jaden Smith, however, is endearing, and has good on screen chemistry with his father. After a while Mom decides she’s checking out, and it’s up to Gardner to support himself and his son. He applies for an internship that will hopefully lead into a job as a stockbroker. Along the way, they get evicted from their apartment, kicked out of their hotel room, and sleep in a subway station restroom. Gardner is a determined individual, and does his best to persevere. I’m sure you can tell where it goes from there.

The script by Steve Conrad, who also wrote the very underrated The Weather Man, is full of the typical cliches and dialogue; “Did Mom leave because of me?” Gardner is presented with hurdle after hurdle to get to his destination, and Muccino doesn’t have the good sense to ease up and give the audience some time to reflect. The overbearing voice over narration doesn’t help matters any, Conrad did this better with Nic Cage in The Weather Man, but Smith handles it well, and doesn’t fall back on his wit and charm as much as usual. He’s actually very good in the role, and he digs deeper than he ever has before. It was very obvious to me that Smith chose this movie for himself, and even though it’s not that good of a movie, it could be one of the smarter moves of his career.

Since I can be quite a snob, I was doing my best to hate this movie. In the end, however, I was won over by Smith’s performance. Being a father myself, I can tend to be a bit of a sucker for this kind of stuff, so I’m not going to dog on it as bad as I usually would. Even though the film plays like a weaker, low rent version of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, I’m still going to give it a recommendation. It’s better than most of the crap that comes out, and it’s nice to see Hollywood giving us a film that has a good father figure for a change, especially a single father. The can do American spirit/Republican ideology is enough to make you gag, but the film is harmless, entertaining, and it stands to remind us all that we should be more grateful of what we have.

In conclusion let me say that I’m keeping this review short. I don’t want to rag too much on a movie that exists to make people happy. Is it contrived and manipulative? Sure, it is, but most movies are, and at least this one is not pretending to be anything else. It’s not pretentious, and it’s not self conscious, it simply gives us a story of a father doing his best to raise his son. I admire the film for that, I just wish it was executed a little better. All in all, Smith deserves credit, besides his Academy Award nomination, for simply wanting to provide the world with an enjoyable movie.

The DVD is available on March 27. It’s rated PG-13 for language and is longer than it should be at 117 minutes. I recommend giving it a watch. It’s nothing to write home about, it’s not something that you’ll remember forever, but it is enjoyable while it lasts, and you can’t expect much more than that out of most movies today. And yes, Happyness is misspelled on purpose.

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