The Pursuit of Cleverness (spoilers)

Rating: 4/10 (27 December 2006)

My main disappointment with the film is that there really wasn't much explanation of how Will Smith did well in the stock broker trainee program. They set things up early in the film to suggest he's some kind of a genius with the rubix cube, but then when he gets to work he tells us his secrets to success were that he didn't hang up the phone between calls and didn't drink water so that he wouldn't have to go to the bathroom and thus could leave work earlier and get to the homeless shelter in time. I was hoping there would be some sort of a twist, some trick he discovered to make himself stand out, but it never came. I was thinking of Charlie Sheen in Wall Street or even Michael J. Fox in the Secret of My Success, for Christ's sake--at least in those films there was something interesting going on that showed the new guy in business finding an angle to exploit to get himself some recognition. No such angle exists in this movie, which is too preoccupied with the personal drama to give you any detail about the brokerage industry at all.
My other major gripe is that I felt like there was no clear message regarding the socioeconomic structure of American society. Much of the film is designed for the audience to sympathize with the poor, downtrodden Smith and son, but what are we supposed to take away from this, other than admiring his impressive determination to make things work out? Is there a broader point about American society here? In a few scenes Smith enviously looks upon rich people having happy times--is this supposed to show the unfairness of class divisions in America? Or is it merely the motivation he needs? There is a clip of a speech Reagan gave on the weak economy early on--is that merely for context, or an implied message that government policy was failing to provide for everyone? Smith's character escaped poverty, but millions of others don't. Should they just work harder and be like him, or did his struggles exemplify how nearly impossible it is, even for someone quite intelligent and talented, to climb the ladder in America? In the movie there's more focus on family drama and the struggle to survive, and as a result these larger issues of professional success and wealth and poverty in the US did not get the kind of treatment I was hoping for. I found the film pretty boring as a result, hence my rating of 4.