THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, the new Will Smith vehicle about a single father’s efforts to move from the poorhouse to a penthouse, attempts to reinvigorate — or reaffirm, depending on your income bracket — our faith in the American Dream. Set in Reagan-era San Francisco, it’s the “true” story of Chris Gardner’s (Smith) rise from a dead broke freelance salesman to a filthy rich stockbroker. Based on Gardner’s autobiography of the same name, the film, written by Steve Conrad (The Weather Man) and directed by Gabriele Muccino (in the Italian’s English-language debut), follows this Everyman with a heart of gold and nerves of steel as he valiantly struggles to raise his boy (played by Smith’s real-life son Jaden) to be a can-doer just like himself. In short, it’s a pack of lies.
It’s hardly revelatory to say the American Dream isn’t achievable for the vast majority of the country’s populace. And it’s nothing new to say that autobiographies are notorious for their disregard of the truth, whether intentional or not. But, since The Pursuit of Happyness shamelessly asks us to believe in the veracity of both, it’s worth remembering America’s indifference to the underprivileged (Reaganomics, anyone?) and autobiographers’ indifference to the way others view them.
Much of Gardner’s problems result from his unwavering devotion to the very system that held him in poverty for all those years. When we’re introduced to him, he’s hawking portable bone-density scanners to doctors who want nothing to do with them because they’re viewed as an unnecessary luxury. What makes his failure on the sales circuit worse is he dumped his entire savings into this product, forcing his wife Linda (Thandie Newton, doing everything she can to avoid playing the heavy) to work double shifts to help make ends meet. Linda is understandably pissed. But Gardner, well, he more or less shrugs it off as a bad move — a big bet on the wrong hand. His solution to pull his family out of their dire straits — take an unpaid internship with a brokerage firm, where he’ll compete with 20 others for a single salaried gig — is of the kind that ends marriages and further perpetuates suffering.
Not that we’re supposed to see it that way. Smith plays Gardner as an industrious man with a solid moral backbone who simply can’t catch a break. He slumps his shoulders, but never looks at his feet. He has flecks of gray in his hair, but doesn’t need Just For Men yet. And he’s book smart. He knows, for example, that happiness isn’t spelled with a “y” as it is outside his son’s daycare center. It’s just, when it comes to getting ahead, the guy is experiencing what amounts to Murphy’s Law on crack. His goals and the methods by which he’s trying to achieve them aren’t wrong, you see, it’s that life always sucks until you make your first million.
So Gardner takes that internship because everybody at the firm looks happy — especially the guy with the Ferrari. This isn’t presented as a flaw in the system or Gardner’s character, however; it’s presented as fact. As in, “being stupid,” according to Gardner’s logic, isn’t buying bum medical equipment — it’s “trusting a hippie girl” to keep an eye on it while you check on that paycheck-less gig. Oh, and taxes are bad. Which is why Gardner doesn’t mind helping rich dudes avoid them without ever wondering why there’s always a line outside the homeless shelter he and his son live in.
And when Gardner takes out his anger and frustration on those close to him, it doesn’t last long. “You gotta dream, you gotta protect it,” Gardner says to his son only moments after telling him to forget playing in the NBA. Frank Capra made sure the equally disappointed George Bailey snapped at his family in It’s a Wonderful Life. But Conrad (who presented a genuine Bailey-type in The Weather Man) and Muccino (whose European perspective is sorely missing) avoid it like Republicans avoid blame. Then again, Capra’s film is fiction. The Pursuit of Happyness is a true story.
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