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The Pursuit of Happyness

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The Pursuit of Happyness
Theatrical release poster
Directed byGabriele Muccino
Screenplay bySteven Conrad
Based onThe Pursuit of Happyness
by Chris Gardner
Quincy Troupe
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyPhedon Papamichael
Edited byHughes Winborne
Music byAndrea Guerra
Production
companies
Distributed bySony Pictures Releasing
Release date
  • December 15, 2006 (2006-12-15)
Running time
117 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$55 million[1]
Box office$307.1 million[1]

The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical drama film directed by Gabriele Muccino and starring Will Smith as Chris Gardner, a homeless salesman. Smith's son Jaden Smith co-stars, making his film debut as Gardner's son, Christopher Jr. The screenplay by Steven Conrad is based on the best-selling 2006 memoir of the same name written by Gardner with Quincy Troupe. It is based on Gardner's nearly one-year struggle being homeless.[2] The unusual spelling of the film's title comes from a mural that Gardner sees on the wall outside the daycare facility his son attended. The movie is set in San Francisco in 1981.

The film was released on December 15, 2006, by Columbia Pictures, and received positive reviews, with Smith's performance and the emotional weight of the story garnering acclaim. Smith was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Actor.[3]

Plot

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In 1981, San Francisco salesman Chris Gardner invests his entire life savings in portable bone-density scanners, which he demonstrates to doctors and pitches as a handy improvement over standard X-rays. The scanners play a vital role in Chris's life. While he can sell most of them, the time lag between the sales and his growing financial demands enrages his bitter and estranged wife, Linda, who works as a hotel maid. The economic instability increasingly erodes their marriage, despite caring for Christopher Jr., their soon-to-be 5-year-old son.

While Chris tries to sell one of the scanners, he meets Jay Twistle, a lead manager and partner for Dean Witter Reynolds and impresses him by solving a Rubik's Cube during a taxi ride. After Jay leaves, Chris skips out on paying the fare, causing the driver to angrily chase him into a BART station; he is forced to leave. However, Chris's new relationship with Jay earns him an interview to become an intern stockbroker.

The day before the interview, Chris grudgingly agrees to paint his apartment for free to postpone eviction by his landlord for late rent. While painting, Chris is greeted by two policemen at his doorstep, who arrest him for failure to pay multiple parking tickets. Chris has to spend the night in jail, complicating his schedule for the interview the next day. Chris narrowly arrives at Dean Witter's office on time, albeit still in shabby, paint-spattered clothes. Despite his appearance, Chris still impresses the interviewers and lands a six-month unpaid internship. He is among 20 interns competing for a paid position as a stockbroker.

A possible position at her sister's boyfriend's restaurant tempts Linda to leave for New York. With regret, she leaves Christopher in Chris's care. However, Chris’s financial problems worsen when his already diminished bank account is garnished by the IRS for unpaid income taxes, and his landlord finally evicts him and Christopher.

With only $21.33 in his bank account, Chris and Christopher are left homeless and desperate; Chris is able to get food and beds at the local shelter, and eventually scraps together cash for a motel room, but the locks are then changed when he can't pay on time; he is then forced to live out of the restrooms in local BART stations with his son. Later, Chris finds the scanner that he lost in the station earlier. He sells his blood to pay for repairs and then gets a local physician to purchase it, thereby freeing himself to focus solely on his stockbroker training.

Disadvantaged by his limited work hours and knowing that maximizing his client contacts and profits is the only way to earn the broker position, Chris develops several ways to make sales calls more efficiently, including reaching out to potential high-value customers in person, a violation of firm protocol. One sympathetic prospect, Walter Ribbon, a top-level pension fund manager, even takes Chris and Christopher to a San Francisco 49ers game, where Chris befriends some of Mr. Ribbon's friends, who are also potential clients. Regardless of his challenges, Chris never reveals his lowly circumstances to his colleagues, even going so far as to lend one of his supervisors, Mr. Frohm, the last five dollars in his wallet for cab fare. He also studies for and aces the stockbroker license exam.

As Chris concludes his last day of internship, he is summoned to a meeting with the partners. Mr. Frohm notes that Chris is wearing a nice shirt, to which Chris explains he thought it appropriate to dress for the occasion on his last day. Mr. Frohm thanks him and says Chris should wear another one the following day, letting Chris know that he has won the coveted full-time position and reimburses Chris for the previous cab ride. Fighting back tears, he shakes hands with the partners, then rushes to Christopher's daycare to embrace him. They walk down a street and joke with each other (and are passed by the real Chris Gardner, in a business suit).

An epilogue reveals that Gardner went on to form his own multimillion-dollar brokerage firm in 1987, and Gardner sold a minority stake in his brokerage firm in a multi-million-dollar deal in 2006.

Cast

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Production

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The film is based on the story of Chris Gardner's struggle with homelessness.

Development

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Chris Gardner realized his story had Hollywood potential after an overwhelming national response to an interview he did with 20/20 in January 2003.[4] Gardner published his autobiography on May 23, 2006, and later became an associate producer for the film.

In order to create dramatic impact, the film artistically altered Gardner's life story by compressing several years' worth of events into a shorter period of time. Gardner makes a tiny cameo at the end of the film, walking past the fictional version of himself.

Casting

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Chris Gardner initially thought Will Smith, an actor best known for his performances in blockbuster films, was miscast to play him. However, Gardner claimed his daughter Jacintha said, "If [Smith] can play Muhammad Ali, he can play you!", referring to Smith's role in the biopic Ali (2001).[5]

Music

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Varèse Sarabande released a soundtrack album with the score composed by Andrea Guerra on January 9, 2007.

No.TitleLength
1."Opening"3:09
2."Being Stupid"1:39
3."Running"1:30
4."Trouble at Home"1:30
5."Rubiks Cube Taxi"1:53
6."Park Chase"2:29
7."Linda Leaves"4:02
8."Night at Police Station"1:36
9."Possibly"1:45
10."Where's My Shoe"4:20
11."To the Game/Touchdown"1:37
12."Locked Out"2:20
13."Dinosaurs"2:40
14."Homeless"1:55
15."Happyness"3:50
16."Welcome Chris"3:45
Total length:40:00

Also in the film are brief portions of "Higher Ground" and "Jesus Children of America", both sung by Stevie Wonder, and "Lord, Don't Move the Mountain" by Mahalia Jackson and Doris Akers, sung by the Glide Ensemble.

Release

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Box office

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The film debuted first at the North American box office, earning $27 million during its opening weekend and beating out heavily promoted films such as Eragon and Charlotte's Web. It was Smith's sixth consecutive #1 opening and one of his consecutive $100 million blockbusters.

The film grossed $163,566,459 domestically in the US and Canada. In the hope that Gardner's story would inspire the down-trodden citizens of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to achieve financial independence and to take greater responsibility for the welfare of their families, the mayor of Chattanooga organized a viewing of the film for the city's homeless.[6]

Gardner himself felt that it was imperative to share his story for the sake of its widespread social issues. "When I talk about alcoholism in the household, domestic violence, child abuse, illiteracy, and all of those issues—those are universal issues; those are not just confined to ZIP codes," he said.[7]

Home media

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The film was released on DVD on March 27, 2007, and as of November 2007, ADCCA – RPC Region 1 DVD sales (U.S./Canada/Bermuda) accounted for an additional $89,923,088 in revenue, slightly less than half of what was earned in its first week of release.[8] About 5,570,577 units have been sold, bringing in $90,582,602 in revenue.[9]

Reception

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Critical response

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The Pursuit of Happyness received a generally positive response from critics, with Will Smith receiving widespread acclaim for his performance. Film review site Rotten Tomatoes calculated a 67% overall approval based on 177 reviews, with an average rating of 6.40/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Will Smith's heartfelt performance elevates The Pursuit of Happyness above mere melodrama."[10] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[11]

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle observed, "The great surprise of the picture is that it's not corny ... The beauty of the film is its honesty. In its outlines, it's nothing like the usual success story depicted on-screen, in which, after a reasonable interval of disappointment, success arrives wrapped in a ribbon and a bow. Instead, this success story follows the pattern most common in life—it chronicles a series of soul-sickening failures and defeats, missed opportunities, sure things that didn't quite happen, all of which are accompanied by a concomitant accretion of barely perceptible victories that gradually amount to something. In other words, it all feels real."[12]

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film "a fairy tale in realist drag ... the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw ... It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness ... How you respond to this man's moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith's and his son's performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams."[13]

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of a possible four stars and commented, "Smith is on the march toward Oscar ... [His] role needs gravity, smarts, charm, humor and a soul that's not synthetic. Smith brings it. He's the real deal."[14]

In Variety, Brian Lowry said the film "is more inspirational than creatively inspired—imbued with the kind of uplifting, afterschool-special qualities that can trigger a major toothache ... Smith's heartfelt performance is easy to admire. But the movie's painfully earnest tone should skew its appeal to the portion of the audience that, admittedly, has catapulted many cloying TV movies into hits ... In the final accounting, [it] winds up being a little like the determined salesman Mr. Gardner himself: easy to root for, certainly, but not that much fun to spend time with."[15]

Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times stated, "Dramatically it lacks the layering of a Kramer vs. Kramer, which it superficially resembles ... Though the subject matter is serious, the film itself is rather slight, and it relies on the actor to give it any energy. Even in a more modest register, Smith is a very appealing leading man, and he makes Gardner's plight compelling ... The Pursuit of Happyness is an unexceptional film with exceptional performances ... There are worse ways to spend the holidays, and, at the least, it will likely make you appreciate your own circumstances."[16]

In the St. Petersburg Times, Steve Persall graded the film B− and added, "[It] is the obligatory feel-good drama of the holiday season and takes that responsibility a bit too seriously ... the film lays so many obstacles and solutions before its resilient hero that the volume of sentimentality and coincidence makes it feel suspect ... Neither Conrad's script nor Muccino's redundant direction shows [what] lifted the real-life Chris above better educated and more experienced candidates, but it comes through in the earnest performances of the two Smiths. Father Will seldom comes across this mature on screen; at the finale, he achieves a measure of Oscar-worthy emotion. Little Jaden is a chip off the old block, uncommonly at ease before the cameras. Their real-life bond is an inestimable asset to the on-screen characters' relationship, although Conrad never really tests it with any conflict."[17]

National Review Online has named the film #7 in its list of 'The Best Conservative Movies'. Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity wrote, "this film provides the perfect antidote to Wall Street and other Hollywood diatribes depicting the world of finance as filled with nothing but greed."[18]

Accolades

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Award Category Subject Result
Academy Award Best Actor Will Smith Nominated
BET Award Best Actor Nominated
Black Reel Award Best Film Nominated
Best Actor Will Smith Nominated
Best Breakthrough Performance Jaden Smith Nominated
Broadcast Film Critics Association Award Best Actor Will Smith Nominated
Best Young Performer Jaden Smith Nominated
Capri Award Movie of the Year Won
Chicago Film Critics Association Award Best Actor Will Smith Nominated
David di Donatello Award Best Foreign Film Nominated
Golden Globe Awards Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama Will Smith Nominated
Best Original Song ("A Father's Way") Seal Nominated
MTV Movie Award Best Male Performance Will Smith Nominated
Best Breakthrough Performance Jaden Smith Won
NAACP Image Award Outstanding Motion Picture Won
Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture Will Smith Nominated
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Jaden Smith Nominated
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Thandiwe Newton Nominated
Nastro d'Argento Best Score Andrea Guerra Nominated
Phoenix Film Critics Society Award Best Young Actor Jaden Smith Won
Screen Actors Guild Award Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role Will Smith Nominated
Teen Choice Award Choice Movie – Drama Won
Choice: Chemistry Will Smith Won
Jaden Smith Won
Choice: Breakout Male Won

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "The Pursuit of Happyness". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on September 1, 2016. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  2. ^ Pfeiffer, Antonia (2018). "The Pursuit of Happyness" – A Hollywood Interpretation Of How To Achieve The American Dream. p. 7.
  3. ^ Littleton, Cynthia (January 21, 2016). "Will Smith Says He Won't Attend Oscars". Variety. Archived from the original on August 30, 2018. Retrieved August 30, 2018.
  4. ^ Zwecker, Bill (July 17, 2003). "There's a Way—and Maybe a Will—for Gardner Story". Chicago Sun-Times. p. 36.
  5. ^ "Smith's Real Life Role Model Unimpressed With His Stardom". Contactmusic.com. December 14, 2006. Archived from the original on May 14, 2018. Retrieved May 14, 2018.
  6. ^ The Associated Press State & Local Wire (December 15, 2006). "News briefs from around Tennessee". AP Newswire. pp. 788 words.
  7. ^ Gandossy, Taylor (January 16, 1222). "From sleeping on the streets to Wall Street". CNN. Archived from the original on January 1, 2007. Retrieved July 14, 2010.
  8. ^ "The Pursuit of Happyness". The Numbers. Archived from the original on June 11, 2011. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  9. ^ "The Pursuit of Happyness – DVD Sales". The Numbers. Archived from the original on June 11, 2011. Retrieved February 13, 2011.
  10. ^ "The Pursuit of Happyness Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on October 14, 2021. Retrieved October 28, 2021.
  11. ^ "The Pursuit of Happyness". Metacritic. Archived from the original on July 14, 2017. Retrieved October 22, 2020.
  12. ^ LaSalle, Mick (December 15, 2006). "MOVIE REVIEWS / Down and out in San Francisco, but on a path paved with gold". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on February 12, 2015. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  13. ^ Dargis, Manohla (December 15, 2006). "New York Times review". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 13, 2010. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  14. ^ Travers, Peter (December 15, 2006). "The Pursuit of Happyness". Rolling Stone. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  15. ^ Lowry, Brian (December 7, 2006). "The Pursuit of Happyness". Variety. Archived from the original on February 4, 2022. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  16. ^ Boucher, Geoff (January 26, 2011). "A marathon runner on life's obstacle course". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on February 5, 2022. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  17. ^ "'Happyness' takes it easy". St Petersburg Times. Archived from the original on June 4, 2011. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
  18. ^ Miller, John (February 23, 2009). "The Best Conservative Movies". National Review. Archived from the original on April 2, 2022. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
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