The Pursuit of Happyness B Cast:
Will Smith, Thandie Newton, Jaden Smith

Director:
Muccino

Rating:
PG-13 for language

Running time:
117 minutes
A male weepie along the lines of Kramer vs. Kramer or Field of Dreams, The Pursuit of Happyness is a shamelessly manipulative good-feeler designed to showcase the rarely tested acting skills of Will Smith. It's a professionally mustered, handsome film - a calculated and heavy-handed grab at both box office and Oscar glory. No doubt it will make a lot of would-be manly guys choke up as they consider the duties that fathers owe sons and vice versa.
    It is the story of struggling medical appliance salesman Chris Gardner (Smith) and his desperate and probably irresponsible attempt to make a better life for himself and his young son by taking an unpaid internship that will give him a shot at becoming a stockbroker.
    Since the film is "inspired by a true story," we can assume that almost none of the events depicted actually occurred, though there actually is a guy named Chris Gardner who did spend a chunk of 1983 on the streets of San Francisco with his 5-year-old son in tow. Gardner is now a high-powered financier worth millions and a protege of self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins. He is, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the type of guy who wears a $10,000 watch on each wrist because he was once late for a meeting and it cost him $50,000. (It's cheaper to buy two watches, get it?)
    A lot of people admire that sort of guy, and when you cast an expert empathy vacuum like Smith - with a touch of avuncular gray in his hair - as that guy, you round off some of the sharp and sharkish corners, making for a convivial hustler. The final piece is casting the actor's real life son - a precious bundle named Jaden - as the cuter-than-cute toddler cum ball-and-chain.
    Both Smiths are quite effective; Will is, as we've known since 1993's Six Degrees of Separation, a tremendously gifted actor. Here he magically projects desperation and shame through a superficial layer of glib self-confidence and Dale Carnegie-style affability. Smith's Chris is a smart, capable but damaged man who never realized his early potential in part because of a thwarted relationship with his own father. We know this because director Gabriele Muccino (the original Italian The Last Kiss) has him allude to this in the speeches he delivers to son Christopher (and all the members of the Academy).
    Muccino, making his American film debut, wastes no time in proving he can be as unsubtle and overbearing as any Hollywood hack-for-hire as he validates the American economic meritocracy by any means necessary.
    A larger problem lies with the script itself, which sounds more like an inspirational speaker's fable than an actual case history. Gardner can work a Rubik's Cube in a cab and say just the right thing when he shows up at an important job interview looking like a, uh, homeless guy. His mistakes never proceed from personal avarice or corner-cutting; the only reason he's flirting with homelessness in the first place is that he made an ill-advised entrepreneurial decision. And his wife, Linda, (Thandie Newton) hasn't the resources to provide much help. She works double shifts at a laundry but can't keep it together; when she bails out for a job in a friend's New York restaurant, Chris reminds her she's an incompetent mother. She meekly assents, leaving her baby in Chris' care.
    But bad things start happening to Chris; he's constantly losing the bulky bone density machines he's trying to move and ends up chasing the Bay Area stereotypes who keep making off with them.
    There is a seed of an interesting movie here, one that doesn't flatter Chris (the real one and his fictional analog) quite so much. Smith hints at an impatient man more impressed with the things that money can buy than he should be, who might have been better served had he done things differently rather than take a flier on a get-rich scheme. The whole film is impressed by the world of money. Subtler and less-starry eyed filmmakers might have gotten at the ultimate emptiness of Chris' desire for what he'd call a better life but which smells suspiciously like acquisitiveness.
    Smith reveals this in a scene where Chris regards with unconcealed covetousness a stockbroker's Ferrari. For a moment it seems like the car, more than providing a decent life and better opportunities for his family, is the real reason Chris decides to try for his Dean Witter internship - another get-rich scheme. Only this time, maybe it will work out.
    The Pursuit of Happyness depends on you not thinking about it too much lest you decide this Chris Gardner isn't so much an overachiever as a kind of grifter who manipulates his way into a program ahead of more qualified applicants and bootlicks to get ahead. That's not the message - in this movie the faceless losers don't count, winning is everything and mommy isn't strong enough to gut it out and make it work.
    Will Smith's performance is terrific, but it's in service of a clumsy, heavy-handed film that believes the ultimate measure of a man is how hard he chases what he desires - wealth, fame, Oscars.

This story was published Friday, December 15, 2006