One for the Money, Two for the Show
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

If you’re black and you want to be in movies, the best thing you can do is skip acting school and start a hip-hop career. The previous generation of black actors came out of the theater, but today’s movies star black people who got their start shouting rhymes into a microphone. That doesn’t mean the results are bad: Will Smith may have spent his formative years rapping that “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” but the former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has grown in talent to the point at which even a movie as fraudulent as “The Pursuit of Happyness” feels like fried gold in his hands.
In this Oscar-hungry tearjerker, Mr. Smith delivers a staggering performance that completely commands attention, which is good because if you look too hard at anything else in this film you’re liable to see holes.
With his hairline shaved back and his puckish sense of humor crushed beneath the weight of a million everyday financial worries, a transformed Smith takes the lead role in this hagiography of Christopher Gardner, a “top broker” and founder of the Gardner Rich brokerage firm. What makes Mr. Gardner’s life interesting isn’t his current wealth but his former poverty: He spent the early 1980s trying to raise his son and land a job at Dean Wittier by participating in their six-month, unpaid internship program while simultaneously living in public bathrooms and homeless shelters.
Like the best rap songs, “Pursuit” takes a theme we all know (internships stink) and makes it epic through closely observed details. Christopher sinks his life savings into a bone density machine that no doctor wants to buy. He can only afford a single present for his son’s birthday. His wife has to work double shifts to keep the family afloat. The parking tickets are piling up, the rent is due, day care costs too much, and suddenly everyone he ever loaned money to can’t pay him back. By the time his wife, the skeletal Thandie Newton, runs for the hills, we kind of see her point: This is the pits.
But Christopher is a dreamer and he fast-talks his way into the internship at Dean Wittier, his eyes on the prize of becoming a broker and making everything all better. A single intern from the pool of 20 will receive a job at the end of the six months, and he goes after it with a frightening monomania. His young son hangs in there as things go from bad to desperate, with Christopher spending his days trying to pass as a middle-class middle manager at Dean Wittier and his nights scrounging up food and a place to sleep. Will he complete the internship and win the job? Will his son be scarred for life? Will everything turn out okay? We all know the answers to these questions
because this is the holiday season — no one in Hollywood wants you to go home heartbroken.
But the sharp details and the acting keep you riveted. Mr. Smith’s real-life son, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, plays his son in the movie and the casting is a stroke of genius. All that’s required of most kids in movies is to act naturally, and since Jaden is hanging out with his dad he’s the picture of relaxed and natural. His performance won’t win an Oscar but it feels far more authentic than the show-pony prancing of creepy Dakota Fanning.
If there was any fairness in Hollywood, they’d just give Mr. Smith the Best Actor Oscar now; playing against type here pays off for him in spades. He underplays all his big moments, and it’s amazing work.
Sadly, about 40 minutes in, “The Pursuit of Happyness” gets stuck on the same cycle: Something bad happens, Christopher works harder, things get worse, rinse, repeat. That’s when you look around and realize how soulless this movie really is. It’s set in 1981, when Wall Street was on its way to becoming a way of life, when personalities like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were about to be cast as heroes and not criminals, and when greed was about to be good. It was also when the homeless were hitting the streets in record numbers and a lousy economy was putting thousands of families in shelters. This is the first American film for the Italian director, Gabriele Muccino, and maybe that’s why he just doesn’t get it. Mr. Smith seems to be the only member of the working homeless, the rest being stock winos and hobos right out of Central Casting. And the film plays like a recruitment video for Dean Wittier. Making enough money to protect his son and leave all this misery behind is Christopher’s only goal, and that’s nice, but what happens after the credits roll?
The movie ends with title cards assuring us that Mr. Gardner went on to have all his hard work validated by making a zillion dollars, but is the film’s only barometer of success the size of your Christmas bonus? This doesn’t feel so much like a movie set in 1981 as a movie made in 1981, subtly extolling every one of the virtues that made that decade a soulless slog.