The film stays clear of Hollywood mucking ...

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2007)

Will Smith's performance as striving single dad Chris Gardner doesn't panhandle for an Oscar in this quietly agonized drama of reaching and missing and reaching and missing again. This Reagan '80s drama takes place in the clearly marked dividing line between that romanticized American dream of "making it" and its realistic nightmare shadow. It's a fine film, with a portrait of fatherhood that is driven and real. The setting is San Francisco and it's based on a true story. Smith plays a man who once was a whip-smart kid but Chris never realized his potential having sunk his savings into a line of medical scanners that aren't selling. Chris is fraying at the seams.
His wife, Linda (the very hot Thandie Newton looking worn to the bone and in some scenes clearly channeling her break-out role in 1998's "Beloved" by repeating the same facial twitches and creepy neck movements associated with that title character) doesn't handle stress very well when Chris impulsively decides he'd rather be a stockbroker in a six-month internship at Dean Witter with no pay! Linda leaves with their child, but it's clear that Chris is the villain who instills misogynist fear in her to leave the boy with him even when Chris is jailed overnight for unpaid parking tickets! However, Chris is a charmer, and he never stops running -- to do so would be to admit defeat to his son -- but Smith nevertheless conveys the gradual erosion of a man's self-worth. Smith's got it easy since he's playing opposite his son (Jaden certainly looks comfortable hanging with his dad), but the understated beauty of the performance lies in how little attention Chris actually gives the kid. He's too busy worrying about Christopher to be with him.
The director Gabriele Muccino is the writer-director of the 2001 Italian art - house hit "The Last Kiss," from which this year's substandard Zach Braff dreck-of-a-movie was extracted. There's a European sensibility to this movie: behavior here is observed rather than underlined and where another director might overplay the racial divide between Chris and his WASPy bosses at Dean Witter, Muccino and screenwriter Steven Conrad ("The Weather Man") let it go.
"The Pursuit of Happiness" is a San Francisco movie with a specific sense of place and vibe from the daily homeless lines waiting for a nightly warm room Â… to the hush of a wealthy suburb on a weekend afternoon before a 49ers game. The film stays clear of Hollywood mucking -- a reminder of how close a person can dance to the pit and fall in, only to find out how heartbreakingly difficult it can be to clamber out. Smith's portrait of resilience and Muccino's clarity of heart are above par. The film title comes from a misspelled schoolhouse mural: If America is about the promise of bettering oneself, why does it have to be so freaking hard?