Believe it or not, this really happened!

Rating: 6/10 (8 June 2007)

The misfortunes that befall Chris Gardner wouldn't seem out of place in a Victorian melodrama, (he's like Eliza on the ice), if it were not for the fact that they are all true, true in so far as the film is 'inspired by real events' which is a cop-out way of saying 'based on a true story'. Gardner is a classic example of the schmuck who made it, the Little Joe with Big Ambitions who went through every adversity and finally realized those ambitions. His was the ultimate 'rags-to-riches' story and it really happened. Did it happen quite like this? And even if it did, is it a story worth telling? I couldn't help wishing it were all fiction and they would embellish it in some way. There is only so much running around with x-ray machines and studying through the night by torchlight you can take.
The film is curiously unsentimental which may not be a bad thing, (better, I suppose, than the usual maudlin tear-jerkers Hollywood turns out), but in refusing to give in to cheap sentimentality it becomes strangely uninvolving. If you go to the movie knowing anything about Gardner you are unlikely to care to much how he makes it through.
The blame for that can hardly be laid at Will Smith's door. Smith makes Gardner a very real, very fallible human being, a 'good man' with enough genuine idiosyncrasies that he never comes across as totally likable either. He's the kind of man you might not want to have to sit down and have dinner with. The closest the film comes to being an honest tear-jerker is at the end when Smith's elation is only fractionally removed from a kind of breakdown. It's a wonderfully moving moment, the best in the film, and those few seconds alone were probably enough to give Smith a crack at the Oscar. Otherwise, it's just another 'inspirational' movie, a kind of poor man's "Kramer versus Kramer", (wife leaves him; he has to bring up his little boy alone), with too many soaring, up-lifting ballads on the soundtrack.