Taken out of context, of course, this could be profoundly bad advice for a parent to give a child. “Never let anybody tell you you can’t do something,” the father tells his son. As its title suggests, this is a movie about pursuing dreams. Happyness also teaches some important lessons. They both give Oscar-caliber performances, and this makes what would have been a good movie a truly great movie. Will Smith plays Chris, and Jaden Smith (Will’s real life son) plays Christopher, and this explains why their on-screen relationship is so credible and genuine. Chris’s relationship with his son Christopher is the major emotive force behind the movie, so everything hangs on the credibility of this relationship as it plays out. The acting is this movie’s greatest strength. It avoids the pitfalls of many movies in this genre-it doesn’t make Chris out to be too saintly, it doesn’t present a dualistic worldview in which all poor people are virtuous and all rich people are villains, and it doesn’t “preach” at the audience.
Happyness is based on the true story of a now-very-successful man named Chris Gardner, and it’s told brilliantly. The story centers on how this man pursues his dream of becoming a stockbroker while he and his son live on the streets. They move into a shady motel filled with others facing similar plights, but are again evicted a short time later. Shortly after this, he and his son get evicted because he can’t pay the rent. The stress of being the sole financial provider for the family has her teetering on the edge of a breakdown, so when her husband decides he wants to take an unpaid internship with a brokerage firm, she snaps-and leaves him and their 5 year-old son. His wife works two full-time jobs but still doesn’t earn enough to cover their expenses. He uses his life savings to purchase a bunch of radiology machines that aren’t selling, despite his best efforts.
The story, set in San Francisco in the early 1980s, is about an African American man who goes through an unbelievably tough streak. For super-macho men like myself, this can be quite embarrassing (though my wife loves it). And once in a while (like when the five-year-old son tells his dad, “You’re a good papa”) you get so close to yelping that you make one of those bizarre “I’m-trying-not-to-cry” gasping sounds. It’s one of those great “against-all-odds” movies where you (at some points) have to spend quite a bit of energy to keep from crying.