Looking at the poster with Will Smith looking all beatific, and Smith junior looking fairly pleased too, one might think this a “happy” film. But “The Pursuit of Happiness” is one of those sad, sad movies which make life seem like a tightrope walking exercise – one misstep and you fall down into the dumps. I don’t regret watching the film – it was engrossing , but it was also torturous (as was Babel), seeing the protagonist trying so, so hard and yet coming up with one bad day after another. Yes, there is a happy ending, a moment of triumph, but it is so fleetingly small, as compared to the length of the movie, that it failed to give me the feel-good buzz I’d been hoping for. Based on the real-life inspirational story of stock-broker Chris Gardner, the film takes us on a short tour of Gardner’s travails when he’s stranded with an unwise decision to invest in expensive bone density scanners and an inability to sell them, thus leaving him in dire economic straits with a wife who works double shifts at a waitressing job and a small son. The wife (Thandie Newton, who was also in “Crash”) finally leaves Chris after a tussle over the son’s custody and moves to New York.

Gardner meanwhile is almost down and out when he decides to try out for a 6 month internship with the brokerage firm Dean Witter. The 6 months are a struggle because besides being unpaid, the internship promises only one out of the 20 interns a job, and Chris must stretch himself very, very thin to accommodate his work, son, and the many unpaid parking tickets, and taxes which land him temporarily in jail and bankruptcy. So Chris and little Christopher must live in homeless shelters and once even in a BART public bathroom, Chris all the while ensuring that his peers at Dean Witter are unaware of his homelessness and dire financial straits.

Will Smith acts beautifully as the tenacious Chris Gardner and Jaden Smith (the real life son of Smith) as Christopher is sweet and natural – a child not understanding the specific circumstances of homelessness, but realizing that his father is a “good papa”. Thandie Newton as Chris’s wife Linda, shown doing scut work to tide the family over it’s financial struggle, is stressed and shrill with the pressure, and I really felt for her – she really did seem to be taking the brunt while her husband tried unsuccessfully to be a salesman. Newton was very realistic in her portrayal of Linda, and in some reviews on the Net I read her character as shrill and screechy, and I’m wondering how else a woman under those circumstances is supposed to behave – sweetly smiling and saintly ? The commonsense media review is simplistic in it’s summation of the situation – in particular it has this to say under “message – social behavior” :

Perpetually irritated mom abandons her son; noble father dotes on son and is dedicated to taking care of him.