'Pursuit of Happyness': An Uphill Climb That's an Exhilarating Breath of Fresh Air

What does he do? His wife (Thandie Newton, in an extremely unsympathetic role that director Muccino plays up by making this beautiful young woman unattractive) has left him, he's been kicked out of his apartment, and he's now on the streets -- with his son.

That's what makes it all the more painful to watch: The proud man who'd dreamed for so much, humiliated not merely by his failure but by the fear and pain it inflicts on his son (played beautifully by Smith's own son, Jaden), which he can see graven in the young face every day, knowing that to a young mind the lack of security is killing to heart and mind. There's no doubt that Chris is filled with rage at the unfairness of it all, that he yearns to blame all his problems on the various larger contexts that all go unstated in the movie.

That may be what he wants to do, but here's what he does: He shuts up and goes to work.

So "The Pursuit of Happyness" -- the willed misspelling of the word is derived from a sign outside the day-care center where he parks his son every day -- is basically an account of Chris's ordeal by internship. On a whim, he walks into the San Francisco Dean Witter office and learns that twice a year, the fancy brokerage takes on 20-odd interns for a six-month training period, salary $0.00 an hour. At the end of it, the guys in the suits may or may not hire one survivor. Chris decides he will be that one.

It isn't easy. First he has to get admitted to the program, a problem made more difficult by the fact that the night before his interview his car was towed because of parking tickets, he was held in jail, and he got to the office only at the last second without, er, a shirt. How does a tall unshaven black man get a job in a largely white brokerage company in the early 1980s without a shirt? He'd better have one hell of a personality.

The movie is devised almost like a rat-in-maze experiment at the Yale department of psychology. Every few minutes some new obstacle comes up for Chris, threatening to obliterate his dreams; then the movie backs off and watches him improvise brilliantly on the run. What keeps him going? Seems to be faith in self, always underestimated. Yet one of the more telling strokes of the film -- and possibly what keeps it from merging entirely with the you-can-be-anything uplift treacle that sells millions of "inspirational" books and tapes a year -- is its (and Smith's) refusal to idealize Chris too far.

He's no paragon of moral perfection (who could sit through something that suffocating?). Instead, we are aware always that he's right on the edge of breaking down, that he has a mean temper, that he suppresses his "real" self in order to become a "business" self that all the white folks will like, employing that most loathed of all old-fashioned virtues, repression. In fact, he's about as far from letting it all hang out as can be: His ethos is, let nothing hang out, and beat them at their own game. And he does that, whether the game is Rubik's Cube or pushing money market funds.

The film's Rubik's Cube gambit is clever, and sure works as a metaphor for natural talent. The cube doesn't know or care if he's Yale Skull and Bones or the janitor's kid; it gives up its secrets only to someone who gets relationships of space, a signifier of ye olde high IQ.

The movie idealizes Dean Witter, turning it into a kind of rooting section for minorities, and at times the movie could easily be confused with a Dean Witter infomercial on late-night cable. Still, that seems to me a fair payoff for services rendered -- after all, Dean Witter gave the tall, unshaven, shirtless black guy a chance when nobody else would.

You could say: It's all a bunch of bull. After all, Chris Gardner was clearly an extremely gifted man with a need to succeed deep and pure. Maybe that's true, and maybe in your case, it's hopeless, because you lack those gifts. But there's really only one way to tell, right? Get busy.

The Pursuit of Happyness (117 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 rated for profanity and psychological intensity.