Will Smiths stars as Chris Gardner in this real life inspired story of rags to riches. “The Pursuit of Happyness” tells the story of Gardner’s life on the streets of San Francisco trying to raise his young son as best he can. Gardner decides he wants to become a stock broker at the age of 38 so that he can provide a better life for him and his son.

As the story opens Gardner, his wife Linda (played by Thandie Newton) and their son Christopher (played by Will’s real life son Jaden) are living in a small apartment in San Francisco. Gardner decides to dump their money into the bone density scanners, the equivalent of magic beans from Jack and the Beanstalk. Bone density scanners turn out to be way more expensive than X-ray machines and Gardner has a hard time selling the machines.

Gardner has to haul around the unwieldy machines from hospital to hospital via the subway which makes for good imagery in the movie. Meanwhile, his wife is working double shifts to try and support the family. Needless to say, this is not a situation conducive to a happy family, but then again this is not a Disney flick.

The stress leads Linda to take off to New York, leaving Gardner and Christopher behind to fend for themselves. Feeling that there are no other options, Gardner decides to become a stock broker and applies for an internship with Dean Witter. He makes the cut by proving his math skills with a Rubik’s cube (keep that in mind if you want to be a stock broker, learn to solve a Rubik’s cube).

The problem is that the internship is unpaid, so Gardner has to sell his scanners on the side while working at his internship full time. At the end of the internship one of the 20 interns will actually get a salaried job.

Now we see Gardner really start to struggle and run. He runs a lot. And he struggles a lot. He gets booted from an apartment to a motel to a subway station to a homeless shelter. Then Gardner gets robbed, his car gets stolen and he’s late for a big meeting. This is the story of Job re-cut for modern times.

But we also see Gardner start to succeed and keep pace with his 19 competitors and ultimately this will be a movie about triumph and perseverance and a father caring for his son.

Oh and about the spelling of Happyness. Gardner sees a sign at the China town daycare where he takes Christopher. The sign is celebrating the Declaration of Independence and the misspelling of happiness has a profound impact on him as the teacher explains that kids don’t care how it’s spelled just so long as they understand what it means. Gardner is then led to wonder why the founding fathers included this as a right and what it means to him.

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Of course, Will Smith delivers with his usual charismatic performance. Don’t expect to see “Independence Day” or “Bad Boys” as it is a welcome change for the talented actor.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Actors, Actresses, Movies. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Be sure to subscribe to the PopTherapy.com feed because it is really, really funny. Have something funny you want to share? Please let us know.