The Pursuit of Happyness

I watched The Pursuit of Happyness on an airplane from Newark to Heathrow this week, so it was probably not exactly the best experience to evaluate the movie, especially as it was on for about an hour before they stopped it (the entertainment had started because we were stuck on the plane for many hours before we actually took off). So I kind of watched the movie in two parts, which definitely breaks the flow of the narrative.

That being said, I think this was an excellent, if slightly trite, movie. It’s pretty much your powerful Hollywood drama, complete with a big star and a cute kid. In the movie, Will Smith plays a man struggling to get by in San Francisco in the year 1981. He’s a salesman of some obscure medical device, which basically means his job is to constantly be rejected as he tries to sell all the devices he invested in. Then his wife leaves him, leaving him a broke and single dad to his four-year-old son, Christopher, played by Will Smith's real-life son Jaden. (That casting certainly makes the father-son bond convincing, a huge benefit for a movie that's main danger is becoming too schmaltzy.)

Enter your favorite “overcome adversity” soundtrack. Will Smith’s character, named Chris Smith, is only a high school graduate, but he's also something of a math whiz. To prove this point, there’s a few fun scenes involving the “latest hot new toy” – a Rubik’s cube, which is one of the few things that solidly grounds the story to a date. So Smith applies to a stock brokerage internship to try to work his way out of his shoestring lifestyle.

Oh yes. It’s an unpaid internship. So, he has to be a single parent, a salesman of an unsaleable product, AND an intern in a highly competitive program. And pretty quickly, make that a homeless single parent.

If I have to worry about spoiling the plot for you, you haven’t paid enough attention. Did you notice that this is movie with Will Smith, the man who has saved us all from aliens multiple times? And that there’s a cute kid involved? Through all the hardship, all the juggling, all the immense pressure of trying to succeed, our hero finally does, and I was surprised to see how much I actually cared, given the fact that the outcome was never really in question.

My favorite part about this movie, though, isn’t the inspiring story, though that makes it worth the watch. What pushes this movie into the above average category is how unconventionally it gives the audience cues with which to understand and invest in the story. It does this in two ways. First, the first-person narration, which some might consider a crutch, is actually used quite effectively here by providing short comic relief or philosophic consideration, so necessary for making a drama not seem too didactic, without actually having to break the story. The narration also helps keep the audience aware of when the story is about to turn; every once in a while, Smith narrates the beginning of a scene saying, “This part of my life is called Being Stupid,” or “This part of my life is called Running.”

Second, the obscure medical device (a bone density scanner or something like that) also really helps the narrative. At first, I thought it to be just a strange and slightly annoying way of making Chris Smith unemployed but unable to get unemployment checks. But each device is very expensive, and so each one, and its sale, represents a significant if unreliable economic buoy for Smith and his son. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, the mere image of the nondescript off-white, sewing-machine-sized device had become a visual representation of the elusive monetary security that drives the whole movie. Very cool to use something that initially seems pointless and boring to the advantage of the story. (If I were still in college, and a film major, I would definitely write a paper about what that device achieves in the movie.)

All in all, if you want a quality uplifting drama, of which there seems to be very few these days, this is definitely worth a look. 3.5 stars.