The Pursuit of Happyness

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) comes from Chris Gardner's actual life, and the misspelling in the title is real too. In eighties San Francisco Gardner was trying to sell bone density scanners. They were not selling. His wife left, he could not make rent, and he and his son ended up homeless. At the same time he was doing an unpaid internship at a brokerage where only one of twenty candidates would be hired. The best known scene is the night in a subway toilet. That is not invented. The happyness of the title is misspelled deliberately. There was a sign with that error on the wall of his son's daycare and it stuck with Gardner. The film keeps the detail. The boy beside Will Smith is his own son Jaden Smith, in his first film. That is largely why the relationship convinces. The real Chris Gardner appears briefly. There is a fair criticism of it: poverty is presented as something individual effort can overcome, and Gardner's story is moving precisely because it is exceptional. Reading the film as a prescription would be a mistake. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: true stories, father and son drama, and films that set out to inspire. Less good for: the homelessness scenes are genuinely hard and the sentiment runs high.