Man wants luxury, has trouble getting it

Rating: 5/10 (8 February 2007)

The Pursuit of Happiness is this year's Academy Awards entry for "Cloying, Sappy, Feel-Good Film of the Year". Ostensibly, it tries to show us the trials and tribulations one might have to face to pursue a simple thing such as happiness. The point is achieved, QED and all, by its tenth minute as the film heaps plague upon plague on the hapless protagonist. Remember The Passion of the Christ with its spiked whips, betraying best friends, and sadistic guards? A more modern setting for it might have been the "cruel" world in which our hero struggles to make ends meet. By the end of its two-hour running time, even the most naive and maudlin members of the audience will have long lost any signs of compassion and empathy.
The film follows Christopher Gardner (based on the real-life millionaire entrepreneur) as he struggles with homelessness, fatherhood, and poverty, while trying to get his foot in the door of a brokerage firm. We see him longingly look at fancy cars, lush green lawns, and big houses, wondering when he can be in that position. The film is a two-hour chronicle of fate dealing scourges and whiplashes to this unfortunate man who only wants happiness through untold riches. One has to be a cold, heartless pessimist not to want him to win, right? Um, not so. Really, are we supposed to root for a guy whose idea of happiness is Merc convertibles and box-seats at a football game? Is someone like that really going to be happy after he gets that?
That the film is based on real-life events is hardly an excuse for the loads of clichés thrown in. The film almost begs to have its poetic license canceled as it tries every hackneyed trick in the book. The film takes predictable turns at each step of the way. At every step, Chris Gardner finds himself on the wrong side of Murphy's Law, being afflicted with almost every bad thing that could happen. Nauseatingly affected attempts to tug at our heart-strings fail miserably after about the hundredth time they are shown.
The film comes with all the trappings of a big-money production. Crisp camera-work (including the handycam-effect that seems to be all the rage these days), excellent lighting, and suitable music (although much of it is of the uninspired, feel-good kind), grace the film as well as any other output from those well-oiled machines. But none of that is enough to save this lumbering morass that begs for our pity and concern, when it almost has the opposite effect.
No kidding, folks. There is nothing in the film beyond what's in the seven words of the summary. I don't imagine it being too much fun for most to sit through a film to know that some guy, somewhere had a terrible time getting rich.