Classic Rags To Riches Story

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2007)

Will Smith puts on an absolutely superb performance in the rags to riches story of Chris Gardner, one of the founders of the brokerage Gardner Rich, who at one point in his life was reduced to sleeping in public bathrooms with his 5 year old son because he had no place else to go. This is a heavy movie, in the end uplifting, but hard going pretty much all the way through. Things start out with Gardner struggling, and hoping to make his life better, but things aren't desperate. He's trying to sell bone density scanners that no one wants because they're just too expensive and they're not a sufficient improvement over the x-ray machines doctors and hospitals would have anyway. The bills are beginning to pile up, he has unpaid parking tickets galore, and things with his girlfriend Linda (Thandie Newton) aren't great and they're getting worse. Eventually she leaves, and Gardner is left to care for his son Christopher (played by Will Smith's real son, Jaden Smith, who showed the potential to follow in his dad's footsteps.) Here was one thing I found difficult in the movie: why Linda would leave her son behind in the desperate situation into which Gardner was falling. It obviously happened, but it wasn't really explained. Linda seemed to have been a good mom, but all that gets said (by Chris to Linda) is "you know you can't take care of him." But why can't she take care of him? Chris lands an unpaid internship with the brokerage firm Dean Witter, which is his only hope, and the movie moves back and forth from the totally in control Chris working for Dean Witter, to the increasingly out of control and desperate Chris who has no place to live. The two most poignant scenes in the movie are first when Gardner finds himself locked out of the hotel room he and Christopher had been living in because he hadn't paid the rent, and, as he looks through the window into the now inaccessible room, the sense of desperation as he realizes that he has absolutely no place to go is palpable. Then, at the very end of the movie, the heaviness finally (and mercifully) lifts, as Gardner is offered a position at Dean Witter and obviously holds back tears as he accepts. The relief, again, is palpable.
The movie title, of course, comes from the Declaration of Independence, and in an opening narrative, Gardner suggests that perhaps Jefferson wrote it that way to point out that happiness can only be chased; it can't really be caught. And, in pursuit of happiness, Gardner does a lot of running. Will Smith is constantly and literally running in this film, to the point where it became a bit distracting.
There's not much to criticize here, though, except that - as I've said - it was a bit heavy to the point at which one of the people I was watching it with sighed and said "is this guy's life ever going to get any better?" It does, and it's a great story. 9/10