Mawkish, lumbering dross

Rating: 3/10 (15 July 2007)

I viewed this film cold, knowing nothing about it, and left it cold. The tale of Chris Gardner,played by Will Smith, a down on his luck black travelling salesman, making good as a Stockbroker has narrative potential. But Director Gabriele Muccino, whose track record is hitherto with foreign language films, squanders it.
I didn't really like Chris Gardner.His pursuit of the stockbroker "Dream" is at the expense during the film, of a squalid life for his young son. His wife, played by Thandie Newton,has a horribly underwritten role. her inability to look after their son, at least in the short term, is never clear.
His co workers at the stockbrokers are all pretty shallow, and objectionable characters - is this really the dream that he is chasing? The narrative hinges on an ever increasing series of disasters and hurdles which impede his "pursuit of happiness". Yet the uplifting element required to counterbalance this in the minds of the audience never really works.
At 117 minutes the running time is a good 30 minutes too long. After 90 minutes I found myself saying to myself, "look he gets the job at the end, can we just finish now?"
Essentially episodic in style, there are some good moments, and good characters, but Muccino fails to "join up the dots". For a film so dark and downbeat, racism and the cynicism of the financial world gets a super-gloss. The happiness that he finds at the end is a Stockbrokers job which subsequently earns him millions . Wow.
A total miss fire. This story should either have been rewritten as a straight comedy - and it could have worked as such, or as a cinema "verite" piece, warts and all. It wasn't, so it fails.