Click to watch

Trailer for "The Pursuit of Happyness"

There are people—I won’t go so far as to call them “masochists”—who do things like bending their fingers back as far as they can, or digging their fingernails into their skin nearly to the point of drawing blood, or holding their breath until they come close to passing out. Ask them why in the world they would want to intentionally cause themselves pain, and they’ll tell you, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

These people might be the perfect audience for The Pursuit of Happyness, a movie that spends hours instilling a depression that you put up with because you know (I’m not giving anything away here) that there will be a happy ending at the end of it all.

The movie is based on the true story of Chris Gardner, a man who overcame more than his share of hardships in life. Lacking a college education and having lost his life savings in a failed business venture, he decided that his personality and abilities best qualified him to be a stockbroker, a job that would allow him to support his family decently.

Gardner’s only entry to the financial world, though, is as an intern—an unpaid position from which, after six months, one of 20 applicants will be hired. His family situation is precarious enough, and it doesn’t get any better when his wife, tired of the stress, leaves him and their young son.

The bulk of the movie consists of watching Gardner move one step forward and two steps back as he struggles for his dream. You would have to have led an extraordinarily blessed life not to be able to identify with his plight, which is what makes the film so uncomfortable to watch at times: This could all happen to us.

What makes it worth watching is the performance by Will Smith as Gardner, for which Smith is pretty much guaranteed an Academy Award nomination. Whatever you might think of the value of Gardner’s chosen profession, Smith plays the role with a restrained dignity. Some reviewers have derided the film as emotionally manipulative, but that’s inherent in the script: Smith and director Gabriele Muccino make it more palatable than most American filmmakers would have done.

Whether it’s all worth it—whether you want to suffer so much with this character in the knowledge that it will all get better in the end—is as open a question as whether the justification given for the misspelling of the last word in the title (from the Chinese-operated daycare center where Chris Jr. spends his days) is equal to the confusion it will sow in the minds of spelling-challenged viewers who are already having trouble understanding why the “y” changed to “i” on the journey from adverb to noun.