A Futile Pursuit of Happyness

The Pursuit of Happyness is the earnest, based-on-a-true rags-to-riches story of Chris Garner, a down-on-his-luck father who was briefly homeless in the early 1980s on this way to being a multimillionaire stockbroker. When we first see Chris (played by Will Smith), he and his wife are barely scraping by, grasping at the frayed edges of the American Dream. They live paycheck to paycheck, kept afloat by his job selling expensive and unnecessary medical machines and her double shifts at a factory. Chris takes an unpaid internship at the brokerage house Dean Witter, believing he can be a success despite his lack of education if he just tries hard enough. Exasperated by their situation and Chris's inability to bring in a steady paycheck, his wife leaves him.

So far so good, but the film soon falls into a predictable, plodding pattern you can almost set your watch to. In his pursuit of happyness (or at least a decent job), Chris stumbles from one Murphy’s Law ordeal into another, taking one step toward the brass ring and then two steps back. There are many scenes of Chris in tortured brooding and potentially touching moments caring for his son.

Oh, and running. Chris does a lot of running. Running here, running there, running down city streets to appointments, running after a streetcorner hippie singer who stole one of the machines he stupidly left with her, running from the cabbie he stiffed. It’s as if the director realized that something was missing from the script and thought that a few action sequences would somehow help.

Throughout the film, we are supposed to cheer for Chris’s grit and scrappy determination. The uncomfortable reality is, however, that Chris is a genuine screwup, and a self-evident one at that. Sure, he has been dealt a tough hand, but many of his problems and crises are products of his own stupidity and irresponsibility.

All the characters in The Pursuit of Happyness are one-note, with the exception of Chris, who has two seemingly contradictory sides. When cold-calling clients, Chris is smart enough to realize he can save a few seconds of time by not hanging up the phone after each call--but he's not smart enough not to run into city traffic and get hit. He's brilliant enough to solve a Rubik's cube during a short taxi ride to impress his potential boss--but he doesn't have the sense to not park illegally while he's selling his machines, getting parking tickets he can't afford to pay. And so on. When it’s convenient for Chris to be smart and plucky, he is. When it’s better for him to be irresponsible and stupid, he is. Chris’s actions are dictated not by any internal consistency, but (as is often the case in poorly written scripts) by the need to move the characters from plot point to plot point.

The Pursuit of Happyness reminded me of a Dear Abby column I read years ago. It was an inspirational story of a woman who had always wanted to become a lawyer but had raised a family instead. An empty nester, she finally decided to enter law school, had great difficulty, but persevered. At the age of seventy or something, she finally passed the bar on her tenth attempt. Dear Abby took this as a wonderful story about determination and not giving up on your dreams, but I had a somewhat different take on the matter. I don't think I'd want to be the client of a lawyer who failed the bar a dozen times, or the patient of a doctor who took twenty years to get licensed because he wasn’t sharp enough to pass the boards.

At one point Chris assures his Dean Witter employers that if he doesn't know the answer to a question or problem, he will find it. Yet we see from his behavior and circumstances that that is emphatically not the case: he has a parade of problems (many of them self-inflicted) that he is clearly unable to solve. Frankly, I would prefer my stockbroker have better judgment in handling my money than Chris Garner shows in his own life.

The performances by Will Smith and his son, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, are adequate, but the Oscar bait buzz is woefully misplaced. Sure, it’s a subtler and more moving performance than we’ve seen before from the former rapper, but nothing special. Thandie Newton is wasted in her cutout role as Chris's shrill, demanding, long-suffering wife.

In his script, Steven Conrad makes sure that there’s always something at stake for Chris: not being evicted, paying his bills, caring for his kid, making the grade. But Conrad forgets to give the audience much stake in Chris. The script stubbornly maintains a straight trajectory, and dutifully coasts along on autopilot from there. There is never any doubt as to the outcome, no real chance Chris will not be redeemed. There are a few moments that depict the uncomfortable friction between the haves and the have-nots (we see a rush of pedestrians stepping around a sleeping homeless man on the street), but it’s mostly glossy and superficial. While not as sickly saccharine as the godawful Pay It Forward (for which I will never forgive Kevin Spacey), The Pursuit of Happyness dips into melodrama without earning its cheers or tears.