The Pursuit of Happyness
Njoke and Jason saw the Pursuit of Happyness recently and wanted to share our impressions of the film in the form of a dyalogue review. Spoiler alert! Don't read the dyalogue below if you haven't seen the film and want to keep things a surprise. The movie is about the real-life story of Chris Gardner, and is a testament to the power of perseverance and the love between father and son. It is a tear-jerker, so bring your Kleenex. The film stars Will Smith, as Chris Gardner, Jaden Pinkett Smith (Will Smith's real-life son), as his son in the movie too, and Thandie Newton as his wife.
Njoke Thomas
No, I did not cry!
I am not a crier! I pride myself on being able to keep my wits about me even when the scene at hand is giving my emotions a good working over. And there were quite a few wailer scenes in this movie.
I will say that I went to the theater with some apprehension. My sister saw it first and declared that she found it to be depressing. Hmm, this movie was being heralded as the "feel good movie of the year" -- could my sister's assessment be true? (my depression threshold was pretty low around then so I wasn't sure I wanted to expose myself to anything too morose) Her reasoning: "all of the movie was about the struggle; they didn't show him savoring happiness". Duh! The name of the movie is "The Pursuit of Happyness" but it got me to thinking.
As humans, do we need to be convinced that the realization of happiness will justify the struggle. Throughout the movie we see this man who has set his sights on a goal and is so sure that once he gets there life will be perfection. But we all know better right? Perhaps that one moment where we finally get what we want is the only pure moment of happiness because a moment later we will identify something else that we will need in order to be happy.
Jason Menayan
There's been a lot of buzz about the movie and its story, so the ending doesn't quite come as a surprise if you've heard more than a sentence about the film.
What do you mean he was expecting perfection? I think he was looking for a quality of life for himself, his son, and his wife (well, before she skipped town) that he wasn't going to be able to provide with just a job to "make it through". He really wanted to "make it". From the very beginning, he is portrayed as a risktaker (or foolhardy), going for the long shot. He suffers along the way and has several crises of conscience;
I thought Smith did a great job of conveying those doubts without losing that underlying drive to put in the energy to realize his dream. Except for that fact that the movie does not focus on his later success, I have no idea why your sister would think this movie was depressing!
I think happiness is a moving target, but that's also the basis for progress. If we were all able to reach a level of contentment relatively easily, I think we'd still be living in caves.
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Njoke Thomas
Speak for yourself! I'd still be an amoeba. I bet you life was less complicated back in the good old days of asexual reproduction!
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Jason Menayan
Ha ha! Very funny, although to paraphrase Woody Allen, being asexual negates your chances of having a date on a Saturday night.
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Njoke Thomas
To me, it's always cool when a movie is filmed in my home turf because the settings are familiar to me.
I know I know I have a huge ego but I imagine that is a very human response. So I noticed in the BART scenes that they had all these advertisements from the 80's and I thought that was pretty cool. I am sure that required nothing more than going to the BART archives but it was a nice touch.
But I have to say, given my knowledge of the high standard of cleanliness maintained in BART restrooms I was thoroughly grossed out and idea of them sleeping on the restroom floor. I dont care if it was the Glen Park station! That child would have ended up with hundreds of varieties of germs!
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Jason Menayan
I think BART bathrooms are a myth. I've never seen one! I've lived in the Bay Area for 15 years and they're perpetually "closed". Now they use terrorism as an excuse. One of these days Geraldo Rivera is going to open up one of these and actually find something better than Al Capone's vault.
Oh, and there is no BART station in Dolores Park. That is a Hollywood illusion, people (although, obviously, a pretty innocuous one).
Needless to say, having to sleep in a public bathroom is worse than the worst, the absolute nadir of existence. (But he did lay out newspaper for his son to sleep on!) It was one of the most moving scenes in the movie because he didn't want to be there, he sure as hell didn't want his son to be there, and still they were banging on the door telling him to get out! He had nowhere to go, and still had to be at work in the morning! And he made it to work. Contrast that with people we know who call in "sickies" to go shopping or to go to the beach.
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Njoke Thomas
BART bathrooms are real! Real nasty! Believe me, I have had the misfortune of needing to use those "facilities" on a few occasions. I will admit that it was back in the late 90's but they were all truly traumatizing experiences. Talk about terrorist activity! When those signs started going up saying that BART bathrooms would be closed to prevent terrorist activity the irony was not lost on me.
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Jason Menayan
Heehee! I'm glad I didn't miss anything, then.
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Njoke Thomas
A lot of people have vilified Thandie Newton's character, saying she came of as a real b*tch. I dont know that I agree.
Let's be realistic: as much as we admired Chris' fortitude I would think it would be really crappy to be in stuck in that situation. Working double shifts every day, husband runs around town trying to sell a big old clunker of a machine and comes back with his hands full everyday (and not with money). Thandie's character just seemed bone-tired and unsupported... even when she was asleep she looked hassled to me. I know that there were a couple times in the movie when he tried to just be loving and she totally blew him off. That would make anybody seem unsympathetic...but I would imagine that it is scary being a mother and not knowing if you'll be able to pay the rent and feed your child.
I wish they had done more to explain her motivations. Perhaps we would have a better understanding of why she left the child (well other than Chris' insistence). But then we have to remember that Chris is the one consulting on the making of this movie, so we are seeing his perspective on how it all went down.
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Jason Menayan
I agree. Hindsight is 20/20, and of course we all know now that Gardner was able to create a success of himself. But at the time, and like you said, she was working double shifts, she could have easily concluded that he was a pie-in-the-sky dreamer with his heads in the clouds...while the realities of rent, food, and caring of their son were day-to-day realities she had to manage on her own. It was a little bizarre, though, that she didn't insist on taking her son with her. I know Chris put up a fight for him, but still...
Maybe I'm just being cynical, but it seemed like the Dean Witter folks and others were really very, very accommodating of some strange behavior by Gardner. We all know the backstory now, but to see someone with no shoe, or in painting clothes, and to actually talk to him, seems strange. Wouldn't they have said, "Go home and change"? It did seem that the cards were all stacked against him when it came to securing shelter, his relationship, and those X-ray boxes, but everything fell into place like poetry in the financial world. Is this a Hollywood exaggeration?
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Njoke Thomas
Poetic license, maybe. I agree that his co-workers put up with some rather odd behavior to say the least. We have no way of knowing how much of that was an embellishment to keep us attention-span-deficient viewers amused.
Though you know sometimes life is stranger than fiction. I actually knew a doctoral student once who lived in his office for a summer and none of his colleagues knew! I think sometimes people suspect that things aren't quite right but to confront the other person would require a certain level of acknowledgement that we live in a messed up world. I mean, think about it--the partner who asked him to borrow $5 and blithely took his last $5 bill. All the money he had in the world. You could just look at that guy and tell he was having a cash flow problem. But once you acknowledge a problem you feel compelled to do something so it's easier for alot of people to look the other way...perhaps pretend that he is some quirky idiot savant.
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Jason Menayan
Maybe after the Rubik's Cube demonstration, his boss was able to give him a bit more license to act weird (certainly supports your idiot savant thesis). And I guess at the end of the day, it was a matter of how he did on the test, and how much business he was able to secure during the training period, and he beat his competitors that way.
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Njoke Thomas
So I am not even going to pretend to be an expert in this area or sermonize on the evils of our society--I'll leave that to people with better facts and a wider audience--but I will say that I was once again reminded and alarmed at how easy it is to become homeless and how many homeless people there are out there. It is a shame (and I am so including myself in this one) how easy it is to become desensitized to it...maybe because the problem is so overwhelmeng I have mentally thrown my hands up. I don't know how common it was for a gainfully-employed person to be homeless back then but these days it is epidemic. I also wonder if the policies have now changed so that a single father can also receive emergency housing and aid if necessary.
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Jason Menayan
The homeless we see begging in SF are not the whole picture of homelessness, and this story is proof. I remember reading that in the mid-90s, there were 11,000 homeless in San Francisco, only about 2,000 of which were "permanently homeless", often with drug or mental problems. The vast majority of homeless are people like Chris Gardner who had a bad run of luck and unfortunately no one to turn to for help. I honestly doubt things have gotten better since then, with welfare reform and the Republican control of the government for the past 6 years (notice how minimum wage just got raised? after 9 years?). A lot of hard-working, non-addicted, mentally-healthy are homeless because they just can't make ends meet.
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Njoke Thomas
I wouldn't be doing this film justice if I didnt make some mention of the struggle to be a good father that is threaded all through this movie. Chris Gardner's persistence in imparting wisdom and love to his son even as they sleep on a bathroom floor struck a chord for me. Granted, there were times when I thought "this is gonna be one messed-up kid" especially when Chris would do something crazy and the poor child would look at him like "what is wrong with you?" but you know he made a commitment that he was going to take care of his son come hell or high water...and he did!
I love black men, so I make no apologies for saying that I often feel like A LOT (not all but alot) of the emotional and psychological issues some black men deal with stem from a lack of strong male role models. The reality is there are a lot of black female headed, single parent households. As a result, there a gajillion movies about the black single mother who makes it against all odds to bring her family to the promised land. I cant think of any others that tells the story of the flipside. Let's face it, this just doesnt happen as much. But I have to say when it happens it is a beautiful thing. I hope this movie inspired at least a handful of men who have been MIA from their son's (or daughters) lives to step up to the plate...and encouraged any single fathers that are struggling to make it. Okay, stepping down from my soap box...now.
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Jason Menayan
Agreed. And hey, this is our soap box--stay on it!
Regardless of whether that tends to be in the case in the majority (of single black women raising kids on their own), continued representations of only that phenomenon, I think, has a way of perpetuating the problem. I think it's fantastic that this story isn't even fictionalized--it really happened. This wasn't wishful thinking. And as we know, it often takes one exception to break a rule (or prejudice), especially if it's high-profile. Taking care of a child against those kinds of odds, and suffering for months without any immediate reward, is something we could all take a lesson from.
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In this dyalogue...
Starter
Njoke Thomas, a graduate of Stanford University (BA, Human Biology) and Harvard University (Master's in Public Health) currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and works in health care policy and strategy.You can also find Njoke Thomas at:
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Jason is one of the founders of Dyalogues, and loves all sorts of online discussions. He believes that anything that gets people talking does the world a bit of good. Jason has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands... Full ProfileYou can also find Jason Menayan at:
- http://blog.yieldbuild.com/author/jmenayan
- http://www.hubpages.com/profile/livelonger
- http://dyalogues.com/blog
- http://dailycandor.com
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