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Dress-code ambitions

In the land of the happy face, only losers frown
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 7th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Poverty is for the poor. Smith pere and fils in a trivial Pursuit at multiplexes.
Will Smith’s rags-to-riches vehicle, The Pursuit of Happyness, is a capitalist fairy tale as blatant in its propagandizing for the “American Way” as the classic “Boy and His Tractor” epics were for the defunct Soviet system.
At least in the up-from-the-gutter American cinema of the Depression Era ’30s (mostly packaged as frothy screwball comedies), the deserving poor would better their betters (an often comical band of toffs) to become decently and generously well-to-do. The Pursuit of Happyness, however, has such canine fealty to the American capitalist system — regardless of its brutality and inherent inequality — that aping the powerful brings just rewards to those who will submit to the States’ social Darwinian structure. Have they no bread? Let them eat each other.
Based on a true story, The Pursuit of Happyness follows the trials of Chris Gardner (Will Smith), a smart African-American man who just can’t seem to get a break in the world. Though he allowed himself to be taken in by a clever scam to sell bone-density scanners to doctors, and manages to sell the odd one, he; his wife, Linda (Thandie Newton); and their child, Christopher (Smith’s real son, Jaden Smith), are stuck in a hand-to-mouth existence in ’80s San Francisco.
Behind on rent, with their car impounded, the Gardners are among the proud poor who refuse any type of government handout — and are, therefore, worthy of our sympathy. Linda toils at a hotel laundry, while Chris desperately tries to shift his scanners. Their son is lodged in a careless daycare center in Chinatown where the kids watch television all day (the center head believes that Bonanza is actually a good history lesson).
The Pursuit of Happyness

Directed by Gabriele Muccino
With Will Smith, Thandie Newton, Jaden Smith and Dan Castellaneta

Yet, while trying to stay afloat on the mean streets of that Reaganomical miracle that was the 1980s, when the dispossessed were suddenly in a greater fight for survival with the thousands of mental patients sloughed off into “community care,” Chris has a dream of becoming a stockbroker at an important firm. He wants the big car, sure, but he also wants the happiness that comes from being a winner.
The film is primarily a descent into hell before redemption. Chris suffers so many reversals of fortune that he becomes a Dickensian protagonist. Abandoned by his wife, jailed for past parking tickets on the impounded car, evicted from his apartment, Chris and his son are reduced to sleeping rough in BART station men’s rooms or in the faith-based missions that, for the parroting of a prayer, will get you a bunk and bowl of soup for the night.
Throughout this dispiriting time, Chris is surprisingly close to realizing his dream — a dream once brand-driven and now fairly generic. Through perseverance and his dress-code ambitions, Chris will become a winner.
For Smith, the role of Chris is itself a dream. In “going for gold” in the film, he is inches away from grabbing a gilded Oscar. Smith’s Chris is a winning enough man, one that we wish the best for. No one suffers more bravely and nobly than Smith. His scenes with his son, Jaden, have a nice honesty to them, as obviously father and son are close in life. Though Newton is fairly reduced to a simple mask of exhausted anger, she, too, turns in a solid performance.
Yet it is the manner and not the matter of this film that irritates. For the sociologically prurient, The Pursuit of Happyness does, unintentionally, provide an autopsy of the age that shaped contemporary America. The vagrant and mad, toothlessly haunting the margins of this film, will never know the “happiness” that Chris sees on the faces of Monday morning brokers off to work, and that’s just how it has to be. Chris hasn’t the slightest bruise of doubt about the system — so why should we?
Title cards at the end complete Chris’ heroic climb to the top. He becomes a broker, starts his own firm, makes his first million and then makes the big money by selling his firm. Full stop. Does he give money to the shelter that once took him in? Does he start a scholarship program for promising minority kids? Does he help found a decent daycare center for struggling parents? None of that, of course, is as important as having played the game and “won.”

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (7/02/2007):

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