San Francisco circa 1980, the setting for Gabriele Muccino’s big budget Pursuit of Happyness, is not kind to Chris Gardner (Will Smith). Successful proto-yuppie types and homeless, burnt-out ’70s holdovers make no accommodations for Gardner, a man who straddles the line between both groups, sporting a tidy suit as he searches for shelter on a night-to-night basis with his five-year-old son Christopher (Jaden Smith, Smith’s real-life son). Their poverty is not meant to inspire pity. Instead, it is used as a backdrop for a film that captures a selfless father pursuing both the American Dream and yes, happiness.
Gardner’s quest, however, is far too predictable to have much emotional resonance. At the start, he struggles in his ice-cold marriage to Linda (Thandie Newton), trying to keep the family afloat selling marginally useful bone density scanners.
The scanners eventually cost Chris his wife when he cannot sell enough of them to pay the rent. Soon, with Christopher in tow, Gardner is evicted from his apartment and then from a dingy motel.
One might suppose all this homelessness trouble would stifle Gardner’s ambition, but instead it only prompts him to aim higher and more precarious — specifically for an unpaid internship at brokerage firm Dean Witter Reynolds. The odds are against him getting a real job there, and he will have no way to stave off destitution as he reaches for his dream, but he goes for it anyway in hopes of striking it big.
Happyness soon falls into rhythm, following Gardner as he literally runs all over San Francisco trying to balance his career, his kid and tax collectors. Smith is most sympathetic (and most believable) in the many scenes with Christopher, playing the father maturely and naturally.
In the end, Gardner succeeds, but the film falters in the details. Some capture poverty accurately (a scene in which Gardner hesitates before lending five dollars to his boss), but others (multiple tacky voice-overs) just cause groans.