Reviewed - The Pursuit of Happyness:GRAB hold of the Dramamine. The following scenario may induce nausea.
Will Smith, that irrepressible avatar of positive thinking, plays an obstinately driven individual who, despite being laid low by debt and briefly rendered homeless, triumphs to become a broker in a major San Francisco investment house. By day, as part of an unpaid internship scheme, he struggles with figures and uses his considerable skills as a salesman - Will Smith could flog salt to slugs, you'll admit - to persuade fund-managers to invest in his financial products. Come the evening he and his young son, flung on the street by Dickensian landlords, join the queue at the local mission. The little tyke, snub nosed and so forth, is played by Smith's own young son. Would you like this plastic bucket or will you be making your way straight to the lavatory bowl?
Well, to be fair, The Pursuit of Happyness - the gruesome title refers to a misspelling on a mural outside the boy's day-care centre - is not nearly as gooey as it sounds. Smith, playing a version of genuine self-made man Chris Gardner, brings raw desperation to the role and, in so doing, quickly dispels fears that the film might veer into Robin Williams territory. Directed by Gabriele Muccino, who brought us the original Italian version of The Last Kiss, the picture has an attractive grainy look and makes excellent use of its San Francisco locations (though Smith, doomed to run throughout, might have preferred to shoot in a city with fewer hills).
All that said, one must admit that Happyness is more relentlessly, stubbornly one-note than a Philip Glass opera. You will find greater variety of colour in the average Mark Rothko painting. Chris is poor. He runs up a hill. Chris is poorer still. He runs down a hill. Chris has more bills to pay. He runs back up the same hill. A bit of narrative contrivance would, for once, actually be rather welcome.
Worse still, the film confirms mainstream Hollywood's reluctance to confront poverty and homelessness without pretending that anybody so inconvenienced need only grab hold of his own boot-straps to effect recovery. You can achieve anything if you try hard enough, the film says. We must, therefore, conclude that those who remain poor have only themselves to blame.
