The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical drama film, directed by Gabriele Muccino and based on the true story of Chris Gardner. The film stars Will Smith as Gardner, an on-and-off-homeless salesman-turned stockbroker.
The screenplay by Steven Conrad is based on the eponymous best-selling memoir written by Gardner with Quincy Troupe. The film was released on December 15, 2006, by Columbia Pictures. For his performance, Smith got an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe nomination.
The title is intentionally misspelled, as it also appears as graffiti in a scene in the film. The misspelled phrase is actually taken from an essay written in 1776 that argued that whites and blacks were created equal. The essay, which was written by Lemuel Haynes, a biracial man living in New England during the Revolution, quoted Thomas Jefferson's well-known sentence from the United States Declaration of Independence, but spelled the last word of the sentence with a y. The sentence, as it appears in Lemuel's essay, is as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Certain [sic] unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happyness."[1]
Plot
In 1981, in San Francisco, the smart salesman and family man Chris Gardner invests the family savings in Osteo National bone-density scanners, an apparatus twice as expensive as an x-ray machine but with a slightly clearer image. This white elephant financially breaks the family, bringing troubles to his relationship with his wife Linda, who leaves him and moves to New York where she has received a job in a pizza parlor. She wishes to take her son, Christopher, with her but Chris tells her no because they both know that Linda will be unable to take care of him. Without money or a wife, but totally committed to his son Christopher, Chris sees the chance to fight for a stockbroker internship position at Dean Witter, offering a more promising career at the end of a six month - no salary - training period. There are nineteen other candidates for the one position. Meanwhile, he encounters many challenges and difficulties, including a period of homelessness and troubles with the IRS.
Box office
The film debuted at #1 at the North American box office, earning $27 million during its opening weekend and beating out heavily promoted films such as Eragon and Charlotte's Web. It was Will Smith's sixth consecutive #1 opening. The film grossed $162,586,036 in the US and Canada, nearly three times its production cost, and a further $141,700,000 in other markets, for a total worldwide box office of $304,286,036. As of November 2007, US Region 1 DVD sales accounted for an additional $89,923,088 in revenue, slightly less than half of which was earned in its first week of release[2].
Principal cast
Critical reception
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle observed, "The great surprise of the picture is that it's not corny . . . The beauty of the film is its honesty. In its outlines, it's nothing like the usual success story depicted onscreen, in which, after a reasonable interval of disappointment, success arrives wrapped in a ribbon and a bow. Instead, this success story follows the pattern most common in life - it chronicles a series of soul-sickening failures and defeats, missed opportunities, sure things that didn't quite happen, all of which are accompanied by a concomitant accretion of barely perceptible victories that gradually amount to something. In other words, it all feels real."[3]
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film "a fairy tale in realist drag . . . the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw . . . It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness . . . How you respond to this man’s moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith's and his son's performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams."[4]
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of a possible four stars and commented, "Will Smith is on the march toward Oscar . . . [His] role needs gravity, smarts, charm, humor and a soul that's not synthetic. Smith brings it. He's the real deal."[5]
In Variety, Brian Lowry said the film "is more inspirational than creatively inspired—imbued with the kind of uplifting, afterschool-special qualities that can trigger a major toothache . . . Smith's heartfelt performance is easy to admire. But the movie's painfully earnest tone should skew its appeal to the portion of the audience that, admittedly, has catapulted many cloying TV movies into hits . . . In the final accounting, [it] winds up being a little like the determined salesman Mr. Gardner himself: easy to root for, certainly, but not that much fun to spend time with."[6]
Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times stated, "Dramatically it lacks the layering of a Kramer vs. Kramer, which it superficially resembles . . . Though the subject matter is serious, the film itself is rather slight, and it relies on the actor to give it any energy. Even in a more modest register, Smith is a very appealing leading man, and he makes Gardner's plight compelling . . . The Pursuit of Happyness is an unexceptional film with exceptional performances . . . There are worse ways to spend the holidays, and, at the least, it will likely make you appreciate your own circumstances."[7]
In the St. Petersburg Times, Steve Persall graded the film B- and added, "[It] is the obligatory feel-good drama of the holiday season and takes that responsibility a bit too seriously . . . the film lays so many obstacles and solutions before its resilient hero that the volume of sentimentality and coincidence makes it feel suspect . . . Neither Conrad's script nor Muccino's redundant direction shows [what] lifted the real-life Chris above better educated and more experienced candidates, but it comes through in the earnest performances of the two Smiths. Father Will seldom comes across this mature on screen; at the finale, he achieves a measure of Oscar-worthy emotion. Little Jaden is a chip off the old block, uncommonly at ease before the cameras. Their real-life bond is an inestimable asset to the onscreen characters' relationship, although Conrad never really tests it with any conflict."[8]
Awards and nominations
- Academy Award for Best Actor (Will Smith, nominee)
- Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama (Will Smith, nominee)
- Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song ("A Father's Way," words and music by Seal, nominee)
- Black Reel Award for Best Film (nominee)
- Black Reel Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Will Smith, nominee)
- Black Reel Award for Best Breakthrough Performer (Jaden Smith, nominee)
- NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Motion Picture (winner)
- NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture (Will Smith, nominee)
- NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture (Jaden Smith, nominee)
- NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture (Thandie Newton, nominee)
- Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role - Motion Picture (Will Smith, nominee)
- MTV Movie Award for Best Male Performance (Will Smith, nominee)
- MTV Movie Award for Best Male Breakthrough Performance (Jaden Smith, winner)
- Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor (Will Smith, nominee)
- BFCA Critics' Choice Award for Best Young Actor (Jaden Smith, nominee)
- BET Award for Best Actor (Will Smith, nominee)
- PFCS Award for Best Performance by Youth in a Leading or Supporting Role - Male (Jaden Smith, winner)
- Chicago Film Critics Association Award for best actor (Will Smith, nominee)
- Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists for Best Score (Andrea Guerra, nominee)
- David di Donatello Awards for Best Foreign Language Movie (Gabriele Muccino, nominee)
- Capri Award for Movie of The Year (winner)
See also
References
- ^ Lemuel Haynes, "Lemuel Haynes, a New England Mulatto, Attacks Slavery, 1776" in Richard D. Brown, ed., Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 258.
- ^ The Pursuit of Happyness at TheNumbers.com
- ^ San Francisco Chronicle review
- ^ New York Times review
- ^ Rolling Stone review
- ^ Variety review
- ^ Los Angeles Times review
- ^ St. Petersburg Times review
External links
