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So, why was this such an easy film to
review, and like? Because hell, I’ve been through situations very
similar to this. Trying to get by, almost being thrown into the streets,
being forced to watch parents suffer to ease their children’s. I’ve seen
it all. And in the end of the film, it’s still a situation that’s
happening to thousands all over the world. “The Pursuit of Happyness” is
an admirable every man tale about the working man’s attempts not to make
it big in the world, but in his attempts to just get by. Smith plays
Chris Gardner with a lot of gusto offering up a truly solid performance.
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Gardner is a very interesting character and
his life is filled with constant failures that seem to turn
up thanks to his relentless attempts to keep from letting
his son down. He seeks constantly to keep his son at his
side, and does almost anything to prevent the misery from
projecting onto him. He makes homelessness into a game,
starves himself, and loses sleep, all for the purposes of
keeping his son Christopher from feeling the same pain. |
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His aspirations aren’t beyond his grasp,
and yet he’s knocked around throughout the better portion of his
story. What’s interesting about Smith’s vehicle is the relationship
between him and his which is meant to be the tent poles of the film,
and often times it works. Smith pulls in a great effort, and is a
very sympathetic and tragic figure. Jaden Smith is also a very good
actor here, providing a performance that doesn’t possess the usual
quirks child hood actors possess. He’s not in the film to steal the
spotlight from his father, he’s there to play a character and he
does it quite competently.
Are we still on the cliché that somehow
finishing a Rubik's cube can somehow identify an undiscovered genius?
“The Pursuit of Happyness” takes place during a time when the Rubik's
Cube was very popular, yet it also helps to provide an excuse to use the
cliché quite prominently. “The Pursuit of Happyness” would be
entertaining if it weren’t so blatantly sentimental and sappy. It
resembles a typical Hallmark original film where plot devices come by at
just the right time. As our character Chris is forced to write down an
important number, to which he can’t find a pen, a friend comes along and
begins muttering numbers which conveniently confuse him. His dream job
features some of the nicest people you could ever meet. And most of all,
we’re never truly given a full impact of homelessness. The two always
manage to find a place to be that’s never as dirty or gritty as we’d
suspect. “The Pursuit of Happyness” many times borders on fairy tale
territory in the vein of “In America,” in which our characters are
always in the area of danger, but never in life threatening danger.
Thus, any suspense or realism is lost in the sea of predictability and
clichés.
In the end, I’m pretty indifferent toward
Smith’s dramatic effort. While Smith and son pull in strong
performances, “The Pursuit of Happyness” is really just a glorified
Hallmark movie of the week with a bigger cast. Sap, sentiment, and hokey
plot devices bog down an otherwise down to earth story.
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