Will Smith's "Happyness" Is a Poor Black Man's Discontent

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2006)

I'm not sure what to think about Will Smith's new film, "Pursuit of Happiness." Of course Smith was as charismatic as usual, and the story blew me away.
A guy down on his luck loses his wife and apartment, but lands an unpaid internship at Dean Witter that promotes only one of twenty interns into paid stock brokers. The film is very aware of its milieu. It's 1981 in San Francisco and the streets are loaded with Chevy Novas, ads for De Niro's "Raging Bull," people eating Clark bars, and big Afros (which perhaps explains my preoccupation with Soul Train).
Smith sells archaic-looking devices we're told are some kind of x-ray machines, bone density scanners was the term, but look like my grandma's hair dryers. He manages to sell enough of these to support him and his son in a cheap motel for over four months until they're forced onto the street.
On one hand the film is a testament to the spirit of Chris Gardner, the man who provides the real-life basis for the story. Somehow, in Smith's portrayal, he manages to make phone calls to brokerage clients and take classes by day, sell scanners and study by night, and smile all the time while keeping a smile on his son's face with jokes about the difference between "probably" and "possibly," all the while seldom eating or sleeping.
That's the problem. Everything's a little too convenient. When bad luck strikes, such as when the IRS confiscates back taxes from Smith's character's bank account, it happens all at once, so as to coincide with other bad luck. That same day one of his scanners is inoperable during a sales call, and the motel manager bars him from his room for unpaid bills. Even more remarkable is that he and his son only blow up at each other once or twice through it all. They're complete saints. When luck finally starts working their way, it's fantastically moving (the screening audience actually cheered a couple of times). You leave the theater harrowed by Gardner's experience, but glad he got his in the end.
Which is disturbing. Not only because the filmmakers have so fully manipulated our emotions, but that they feel we can sympathize with a poor black man only if he's a saint against whom Circumstances (with an intentional capital "C") have conspired against. If he's a normally flawed human being, then he's caused his own misfortune and he's unsympathetic. Or so the filmmakers seem to reason. And probably broader society, too. The world would be much more threatening if we realized our misfortune results from fate or chance as much our conscious choices.
Perhaps it shouldn't be disappointing the filmmakers wanted to secure our sympathy rather than challenge our notions about the poor, especially poor minorities. But it seems like a brilliant story, whether the guy's a saint or not, and if it were told more realistically, it might've inspired a more meaningful sympathy.