The Pursuit of Happyness
"The Pursuit of Happyness" is a curious bird to have landed in this awards-conscious season. For one thing, Will Smith's performance as a striving single dad has the grace to not panhandle for an Oscar. For another, there's very little self-congratulation about the film, and much that's uncomfortably dark. A quietly agonized drama of reaching and missing and reaching again, it takes place in the crack between the American dream and its nightmare shadow. It's a fine film, with a portrait of fatherhood that feels scuffed and driven and real.
The movie is set in San Francisco at the height of the Reagan '80s, for no other reason than that it's based on a true story. Smith plays Chris Gardner, the kind of man who once was a whip - smart kid but has never realized his potential. Having sunk his savings into a line of medical scanners that aren't selling, Chris is beginning to fray at the seams. His wife, Linda (Thandie Newton, looking worn to the bone), can't handle the stress, especially when her husband impulsively decides he'd rather be a stockbroker instead.
Soon enough, Chris has solo care of his 5-year-old son, Christopher (played by Smith's own son, Jaden). Using his natural bravado and a knack with a Rubik's Cube, the 30-something high school graduate talks himself into a six-month internship at Dean Witter, with a long-shot chance for a job at the end. The catch is that there's no pay.
"The Pursuit of Happyness" -- the title comes from a misspelled schoolhouse mural -- has a lot on its mind but mostly this: If America is about the promise of bettering oneself, why does it have to be so freaking hard?
Chris has one foot on an escalator going up and one foot on an elevator plummeting into the socioeconomic basement. While the other interns work late, he has to get his son out of day care. Casual misfortunes pile up; homelessness nears, like an out-of-control car spinning toward the hero in slow-motion. Which Chris will become the real one? The can-do salesman in a suit or the father desperately protecting his son in the wee hours of a city shelter?
The film has been lightly fictionalized from the life of the actual Chris Gardner, who has since written his own inspirational autobiography of the same name. The movie's not as interested in uplift, though, as it is in panic and the resourcefulness it engenders.
Chris is a charmer, and he never stops running -- to do so would be to admit defeat to his son -- but Smith nevertheless conveys the gradual erosion of a man's self-worth. I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love. Maybe Smith's got it easy because he's playing opposite his son (Jaden certainly looks comfortable hanging with his dad), but the understated beauty of the performance lies in how little attention Chris actually gives the kid. He's too busy worrying about Christopher to be with him.
The director is Gabriele Muccino, the writer-director of the 2001 Italian art - house hit "The Last Kiss," from which this year's substandard Zach Braff movie was extracted. There's a European sensibility to the storytelling: Behavior here is observed rather than underlined, and where an American director might overplay the racial divide between Chris and his WASPy bosses at Dean Witter, Muccino and screenwriter Steven Conrad ("The Weather Man") let it go. The top man at the firm, played by that dear old character actor James Karen , is happy to grant Chris his humanity. Hejust can't see that the man's drowning.
"The Pursuit of Happyness" is also a San Francisco movie to its bones, with a very specific sense of place and vibe. (The WASPs probably wouldn't be quite as inviting in an East Coast film.) But everything about it is specific, from the gray peppering Smith's hair to the hush of a wealthy suburb on a weekend afternoon in one scene.
There are a few too many coincidences involving errant medical scanners, and that Rubik's Cube is both a screenwriter's invention and a cross-promoter's dream. By and large, though, the film stays clear of Hollywood mucking about. Again, it's a curious movie for the season -- a reminder of how close we dance to the pit, how easy it is to fall in, how heartbreakingly difficult it can be to clamber out. This alone makes it a welcome holiday meal. Smith's portrait of resilience and Muccino's clarity of heart are simply the gravy.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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