The Pursuit of Happyness (***3/4)

 ? Will Smith plays Christopher Gardner, a salesman trying to stay afloat and take advantage of opportunity, in the early 1980s. Italian director Gabriele Muccino (whose Last Kiss was remade this year) makes his English-language debut with a script by Steve Conrad (The Weather Man).

+ I figured I’d like this movie when Gardner tells a janitor that the inspiring slogan on the wall outside his son’s day-care facility is misspelled (hence this film’s title). Only then does he mention the four-letter graffito someone added. Thanks to such details, this is a true story that actually feels like one. With a minimum of melodrama, it gives a picture of how tough it is to dig yourself out from a financial hole without a support system, and without shortcuts. Yeah, the movie’s a feel-good story, but if you look at how hard Gardner had to work to get ahead, and how smart he had to be, you can understand why so many people who are not lazy and not stupid can’t do what he did. The bone-density scanners Gardner carries around for much of the film provide both a running sight gag and a metaphor for the weight of the past mistakes he’s trying to overcome. The movie this reminded me of was the underrated Cinderella Man. Although that was about Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock, it was the other fairly recent movie that made me feel something of what it must be like to have to worry about every dollar, and the indignity of not being able to shield your family from the effects of that day-to-day struggle. Smith, in what might be his first regular-guy film role since Made in America, tones down but maintains his on-screen affability. Smith’s son Jaden plays the same role in the movie; he’s a natural.

- I guess if I wanted to criticize this I could say that whereas Cinderella Man used Braddock’s story as a window into Depression-era America, this doesn’t use do anything but show one man’s unlikely path to success. I could say that the movie falsely implies that anyone can make it by hard work and fortitude, whereas in reality Gardner also had a great deal of innate intelligence that also made that possible. I could say that it’s a movie about a poor black guy trying to make it in corporate America that nonetheless has nothing to say about the intersection of race and poverty. But if this isn’t a movie of great social import, it is well-paced, moving, and consistently entertaining.

= ***3/4 I found this Pursuit absorbing from beginning to end.

IMDb link