empathy for the struggling working man - connect with it, if you can

Rating: 8/10 (26 August 2016)

Sometimes (maybe often times, or not even 'maybe') it really does make a difference when you see a film at a particular time in your life. Case in point, this movie, which got Will Smith his third(?) Oscar nomination playing a down-on-his-luck father trying to support himself and a five year old son and hustling medical equipment while also being an intern at a brokerage. At the time I think I saw the trailers and the reviews and thought 'eh, looks like Oscar-baity pap, pass.'
But also at that time - and here I'll get personal so bear with me - I was actually doing not too badly post college; I didn't have any debts then (my parents said they'd take care of any student loan debt), and had a steady job with my family's business. Since then the family business closed, I went to work at another place that didn't work out, drove a cab for a while, and now I'm working as a deliver driver for a diner - and during this going to graduate school for screen writing, getting that, and then getting saddled with the student loan debt (and debt from financing for the most part myself for a feature film, which is a story in and of itself for another time), and then becoming an adjunct professor, which is not as steady an income as it comes. This may be in too much detail, but the point I'm trying to get at is... life is a struggle. Things aren't always handed to people, and this isn't necessarily a race thing (I can't say for certain if Will Smith's character Chris Gardner was white things would be necessarily easier - certainly being black in America makes rising to the top harder, again another thing to talk about for another time and maybe I'm not the one to write about it, at least not right now).
The struggle of survival is something that crosses lines into something that is fundamental, and certainly it requires some empathy - I don't think this is necessarily for the sociopaths out there, or people who might dismiss it for, say, a guy like Smith who has wealth playing an 'average Joe' - but I think it hit me harder having lived through a life where having to work day by day, having to make bills down to the last minute (or maybe not paying them quite on time), and simply the sheer horrible-indifferent beast known as *bad luck* made me see Gardner even clearer than when I was fresh out of college.
Now, does this make The Pursuit of Happiness some instant classic ala Bicycle Thieves, also about the constant, existential "pursuit" of staying alive moment to moment and beat to beat? No, not quite. But then I didn't quite expect that anyway; this is following a character through a longer timeline anyway, as Gardner is at this firm as an intern and sometimes his luck as he has his son (along with his son, played by Jayden Smith at a time when he was more natural an actor than now it seems), and so the rise-fall-tiny-rise-fall-fall-fall-eventual-YES-success story is not too hard to see coming around every turn of the corners of the film. This is also not to say it's not hard to compare it to De Sica's film (also by the way this comes from an Italian filmmaker transitioning to Hollywood): one scene where Gardner and his son are at a restaurant with a moment of respite from life with a meal see a better-off family in the place and looks are exchanged. Class structure in action.
But it's the emotion that's poured in by Smith and how everything is kept at this 'what-do-I-do-next, and then what' narrative that goes between what Gardner has to do and how he *must* always be a good father (this, too, creates some drama), that makes the film work so and connects with me. I don't have a son but that doesn't mean I can't empathize with this part either (ironic to see this here and then ten years later Smith as Deadshot with the 'all for my daughter' part of his character that didn't ring as true, but I digress). He's playing a regular guy who is smart and listens and tries to do his best, and yet he doesn't make him a superman. He can get hit by a car while trying to get back his medical device a homeless man took from him; he can get stiffed $14 from a local "friend"; he and his ex (Thandie Newton in a wonderful if under-utilized part); he can get angry or distracted at the wrong times. If we empathize with him it's because his character *does* have flaws and has to work through them to get where he needs to be (or as he says, he has to work so much harder just to get ahead).
So, again, this may come down to timing for me connecting with this so much - maybe at another time I'd think 'oh, please' - but at any rate, Smith gives a performance that is perhaps his most convincing as a dramatic actor, with flashes of his charisma but channeled into someone who is more like the audience at large coming to see him than those surrounding him in lush Hollywood. It's imperfect and occasionally sentimental, but it rings true more often than not, and that counts. It's a nice block of studio neo-realism, if that contradiction makes sense.