As in all rags-to-riches tales, we find the protagonist, Chris, unappreciated and looked down upon at the start.
Yet even without a false move on his part, just an extra push of bad luck, he might land on those streets, and with such a thud he might never rise. He's doing everything he can, and he has a son he is raising on his own. He finds both on the streets of San Francisco - circa 1981, in this case, but some things don't change - and he films them in a way that we're always aware: Our hero works hard. Gabriele Muccino ("L'Ultimo Bacio") directed it, and his fine Italian hand can be detected in Andrea Guerra's score, with its Italianate wistfulness and whimsicality, and in Muccino's very European enjoyment of American poverty and desperation.
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 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. It may have seemed that way from the trailer: Will Smith tells his son, "Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't do something - even me." But in context, even that moment isn't cloying. The great surprise of the picture is that it's not corny. And because we know that - because we've seen more than one movie in our lives - "The Pursuit of Happiness" has a particular challenge: To take the real-life rags-to-riches story of stockbroker Chris Gardner, a story with a preordained happy ending, and imbue it with tension and suspense.
Certainly, no one would make a Will Smith movie about a guy who breaks under the strain of his difficult life, abandons his child and dies. No one would make a movie about a guy struggling to succeed who doesn't ultimately succeed.
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