"The Pursuit of Happyness"

Will Smith plays a struggling salesman in a picture that's less about "getting" than about "not having."

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Will Smith, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Photo: Columbia Pictures

Jaden Smith and Will Smith in "The Pursuit of Happyness."

Dec. 15, 2006 | The easy way to read Gabriele Muccino's "The Pursuit of Happyness" is as an inspirational story, a go-for-the-gold heart-warmer affirming that in America, anyone can pull himself up by the bootstraps and make something of himself. This is a movie -- set in early-1980s San Francisco and based on a true story -- about an immensely likable but struggling salesman, Chris Gardner (Will Smith), who never went to college and who's having trouble making enough money to support his family, which includes a wife, Linda (Thandie Newton), and a 5-year-old son, Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Smith's son in real life). Chris pushes for a chance to get into a stockbroker-training program at Dean Witter Reynolds, and he makes the cut. But the internship doesn't pay, and there's no guarantee he'll be offered a job at the end of it. Against all odds, he pushes toward success, eventually turning his life around.

Basically, that's what happens in "The Pursuit of Happyness." And yet that outline doesn't even ruffle the surface of what the movie is about. This is a movie about the state of not having any money, and about how not having money isn't just a bald economic fact but, particularly if you have children, a spongy specter that expands to fill every minute of your day. "The Pursuit of Happyness" isn't a tract about poverty in America, and perhaps partly because it's a mainstream, big-studio movie (and not a grainy indie with junkies and squalling babies), some critics have already complained that it makes homelessness look too clean, too neat and tidy. (I guess we like our movie poor to be easily identifiable by their dirty clothes.)

But the picture's ending -- which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it -- is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters. "The Pursuit of Happyness," even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture -- like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar.

Before he becomes a success story, Smith's Chris Gardner spends his days knocking on doctors' doors, trying to sell them an expensive and not wholly necessary device, a portable bone-density scanner. (The thing comes in a plastic carrying case that makes it look like an old 1960s sewing machine; one crazy homeless guy is convinced the thing is actually a time machine.) No one really wants these scanners, but Chris has sunk his family's savings into them, so he has to sell them. One day he stops on the street to chat with a white guy in a nice suit who has just pulled up to the curb in a red sports car. How does a guy make enough money to buy a car like that? Chris asks him affably. The guy tells Chris he's a stockbroker, and when Chris asks him if you need to have gone to college for that, the guy assures him that the answer is no. "You just have to be good with numbers, and good with people."

Chris is both of those things -- in one of the movie's strokes of unapologetically conventional shorthand, he impresses a Dean Witter higher-up by solving the Rubik's cube during a taxi ride -- so he wonders why he can't become a stockbroker himself. But before he even comes close to that goal, the complications pile up and intensify, and he finds himself a single dad who has to support and care for a young child -- with no money coming in, and not for lack of trying.

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