The Pursuit of Happyness
Director: Gabriele Muccino

Columbia Pictures 2006

By Hunter Stephenson

This is a mainstream family-type tearjerker that’s actually worth a look, or at least a discussion, or something to read about on the Internet. A lot of people and critics have called the movie "depressing.” Um, good one, it’s about a struggling black guy who becomes homeless with his kid. And Chris Gardner, whether it’s Will Smith’s character here or the actual guy, is thankfully no Jimmy Stewart-type. The real Chris Gardner went on to buy a Ferrari from Michael Jordan and, as viewed on the special features, kick it with Nelson “Madiba” Mandela. This guy likes money, power and capitalism and that’s all reflected in the film; the “happyness” is not merely obtaining financial stability, but hitting pay-dirt against harsh odds as a stockbroker.

It’s while competing for a job at Dean Witter up against 19 white guys that Chris Gardner becomes homeless and spends a year struggling on the streets with his five-year-old son (in real life, his son was a toddler at the time). They bounce restlessly from a homeless shelter to buses to a church and a transit station bathroom, where they sleep on a mat of toilet paper. In a sort of curious plot loop, Gardner was in fact homeless after he had completed the internship and scored the job, but that wouldn’t be as smooth on screen. Get the definitive American Dream Job of the Gordon Gecko ‘80s; footnote: still homeless. That’s life.

You have to give it up for the film though, because not too many movies grossing $165 million or even a quarter of that have tackled homelessness and the millions of people in this country who live paycheck to paycheck; and, sorry if that’s depressing asshole. Italian director Gabriele Muccino (One Last Kiss, haven’t seen it) lends the film’s tapestry of the American Dream, race, class and fatherhood a deftly straight hand. The direction is probably the sole reason why the film works, especially given that the title alone (taken from Garder’s autobiography of the same name) conjures chalk daisies written by urban children on pavement…in the worst way possible. Sophisticates of American film no doubt have dismissed this for its title alone and will never bother seeing it. Fair enough. Fuck shit like Freedom Writers, I agree. But the ones who have and like to state that the film lacks subtext, for money is not happiness and race is barely a factor here, a cop out, are in fact, dumbasses.

Muccino places subtext throughout the movie with a misleading subtlety. This is not a “gritty” film, nor does it pretend to be, but there’s a real subversive quality to it. For example, we get a schizophrenic ‘60s-nostalgic bum who inexplicably keeps appearing and ends up stealing one of Gardner’s boxy, suped-up X-ray machines, which Gardner peddles to break even (and go broke). But even this bum – where a lesser director would use such a character for petty, uncouth comedic relief to please kids – is realistic for a film like “this;” his craziness and poverty are presented as a bleak side effect and reflection of America’s own crazy social history, of which Gardner is entwined, with his conflicting homelessness and ‘80s hunger for material things. Muccino doesn’t make this an underdog story or make Gardner an everyman for audiences to aspire to follow.

Gardner comes off in the film as occasionally aloof, selfish, stubborn, lazy, subservient and egotistical. It’s hard to relate to him at the beginning as he consistently fails to pay rent or daycare fares by hawking that admittedly overpriced medical equipment. The guy clearly doesn’t want to get a nine-to-five, even as his wife works double shifts. You can’t blame her when she shits on Gardner and their son to be a waitress in Chicago, and the film refuses to paint it so you might. Gardner’s dilemma is not for lack of opportunity, and obviously he possesses above average intelligence, if only an education with the navy. His faults combined with a quiet, realistic autonomy and isolation, are what make him intriguing and original.

He’s not polished, as you might expect by from Will Smith, and Muccino deftly mutes his encounters with the outside world to make the audience think. Instead of slipping a scene in there to bait the audience with race, as many critics seemed to demand, he lets skin color speak however it does to you. During his internship, several of the white bosses overly pester Gardner to do mundane lacky-boy tasks, like fetching donuts, moving a car, and lending over five bucks; petty tasks for sure, but also demeaning, since the other white interns are never shown being asked to do them. So, is there a playfully underlying racism or is this just pecking order nonsense on the line of The Devil Wears Prada? Is Gardner letting these slights slide out of desperation and a need to climb the ladder, or doing what he needs to do? These are things most people face, in the conformed corporate world or not, black or white. The pressures are there and the lines are dubious, as always.

One of the best scenes with this character is when he runs into a street chasing said casualty-of-the-‘60s bum and smashes into the windshield of a stranger’s car. It’s surprisingly jarring because he probably has a concussion, but quickly gets up and focuses on finding a lost shoe. The driver of the fucked-up car proceeds to nibble around for possible hints of litigation and repeatedly says, “Are you alright asshole?” Smith leaves the scene in a dash, windshield cracked to pieces, and it’s almost as if the search for the shoe, while definitely lost, was a parlor trick in disorientation. It’s something you’d see on the streets of any city. This guy is a bit of a hustler if you haven’t gotten that yet. And that’s a good thing for this film – it’s not the American Dream free of loopholes and smothered in bullshit innocence you thought it was.

As you might expect, there’s a scene in a church, complete with a choir. It’s another case of Muccino using understated subtext as a self-reflective irritant. As much as you’d like to groan that the film contains this scene (even though it’s one of the “truer-to-life” scenes in the film) to pander to the Passion of the Christ crowd, it’s unusually difficult to make the case. Inside, Smith’s character is sore-eyed, zoned out and doesn’t have more than $3 in his wallet with no place to go and a son. Anyone who’s lived in a city knows that late night services serve as borderline retreats for many of the poor. And even in this setting, religious faith is never at play, unless you believe in whatever.

In a film that doesn’t make any grand, overly righteous statements besides maybe take care of your damn kid, the use of common downers like parking tickets, low cash, friends who help you move and then say they don’t owe you “that 14 dollars” affably represents a lot about life's directions and randomness. It’s something you don’t see too much of in films of any genre or budget these days, and for that alone it’s a success.

This discourse of The Pursuit of Happyness is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.