I take a lot of crap whenever I write about recent movies and spoil them for our readers, but I also keep getting asked to write about movies more often, so I’ll attempt to strike a Happy(-ness!) medium here and give you my official Really Late Movie Review of “The Pursuit Of Happyness,” which, despite coming out a year and a half ago, I didn’t actually see until last night:
PRO: So many damn setbacks — every time Will Smith’s character would accomplish something, three more things would go wrong, which at least kept the movie constantly engaging, if a bit dramatic. The middle segment of the film might as well have been a montage of worse and worse places where Will Smith and his son had to sleep, from a crappy motel to a subway bathroom to an overcrowded church to a grocery bag in a river to a cave of dogsh*t, and so on, set to the Jackson Five’s “ABCs” for no reason.
CON: They could’ve worked in the overarching theme of “happiness” a little more seamlessly than having Will Smith literally LOOK AT A NICKEL and think to himself, “and at that moment, I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson. He is the president who is on the nickel, and also he wrote about ‘the pursuit of happiness.’”
PRO: Big-screen work for Dan Castellanetta!
CON: None of the white people in the film are even the sliiiiiightest bit racist, or even cautious, towards the Chris Gardner character, which may have been the way it really was, but it smacked a tad of “let’s not make the film’s target audience of 30-55 year old white people roll their eyes by insinuating that blacks would face any resistance when attempting to enter the world of 1980s high-powered stock trading.”
PRO: After an empty-walleted Will Smith stiffs a cab driver and sprints away while being chased by the cabbie, I guaranteed out loud (I was watching the movie by myself) that near the end of the film, a newly-wealthy Will Smith would run into that same cabbie again and give him a thousand dollars, leaving him graciously bewildered. This scene never happened, and I commend the producer / director / one rogue editor on this decision.
CON: The ending titlers were really, really bizzarre. There were only two; one that said “Chris Gardner started at Dean Witter then opened his own firm three years later,” followed by a quick movie scene of Christopher Jr. telling his dad a joke, then one final title screen saying “In 2006, he sold a minority share of his company for millions.” What is resolved by this? He obviously begins earning enough of a salary at Dean Witter to no longer face the 10,000 financial problems per second confronting him throughout the film — the final titler was basically one last “Oh by the way, he is f*cking LOOOOAAAADEDDDD now! Hope you enjoyed the sad film! [CREDITS]”
VERDICT: I really enjoyed this film, actually. The scene in which Will Smith leans against a symbolic fence and tells his son “don’t let anyone tell you what you can’t do” was actually a one-time anomaly blown out of proportion in the previews, and not, as I had close-mindedly expected, a common occurrance in a cookie-cutter Oscar-baiting film.
This was also the first time I’ve ever seen Will Smith in a role where I wasn’t constantly aware that it was Will Smith. I don’t mean that as a slight; he was great in “Ali,” I was just very aware that it was Will Smith playing Ali the entire time. In “Pursuit of Happyness” — much like Jim Carrey’s role in “Eternal Sunshine” — I never really noticed or cared about the actor, but was more preoccupied with the CONSTANT problems that apparently arise when you have no money, a child, and a bunch of 80s-ass-looking portable X-Ray machines.
Also, any movie that features a child actor this prominently that doesn’t make me want to elbow myself in the groin until I pass out is an automatic achievement.
I give this movie one Really Late Thumbs Up!
