Man tries to overcome odds and bring up his son

Rating: 6/10 (13 July 2013)

This film is very watchable, but has one major problem that makes it impossible for me to rate it highly. It's basically a copy of the classic Italian realism film from the 1950s, Bicycle Thieves. The plot is almost identical - just swap Will Smith's radiation machine for a bike and give it a modern reboot with some minor changes and you've got a box office hit on your hands. There is one major difference between the two films - one will do down as one of the greatest in cinematic history, while the other will soon be forgotten. One's McDonald's, the other is Mitchelin starred; one's a tear-jerker, the other's a heavyweight tragedy. The Pursuit of Happiness has the relationship between father and son at its heart. It's about the dad trying to hang on to some threads of dignity and maintaining a relationship with his son while faced with crippling poverty. But the film is painted on a small canvass that fails to really tell us anything worth holding on to about human existence. Whereas Bicycle Thieves is the true story - it shows how many of us live on the margins of society and how luck, good and bad, can decide the course of our lives. In telling us this it tells us so much. I'm unsure what Pursuit of Happiness left me with apart from some fake tears.