The Pursuit of Happyness: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
No edit summary
No edit summary
Line 1: Line 1:
{{Otheruses|The Pursuit of Happiness (disambiguation)}}
{{Otheruses|The Pursuit of HI Happiness (disambiguation)}}
{{Infobox film
{{Infobox film
| name = The Pursuit of Happyness
| name = The Pursuit of Happyness

Revision as of 17:33, 1 December 2009

For other uses, see The Pursuit of HI Happiness (disambiguation).
The Pursuit of Happyness
Theatrical release poster
Directed byGabriele Muccino
Written bySteven Conrad
Produced byWill Smith
Steve Tisch
James Lassiter
Todd Black
Jason Blumenthal
StarringWill Smith
Jaden Smith
Thandie Newton
Brian Howe
Dan Castellaneta
CinematographyPhedon Papamichael
Edited byHughes Winborne
Music byAndrea Guerra
Production
companies
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release dates
United States:
December 15, 2006
United Kingdom:
January 12, 2007
Running time
117 minutes
CountryTemplate:FilmUS
LanguageEnglish
Budget$55,000,000
Box office$307,077,295

The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical drama film, directed by Gabriele Muccino and based on the true story of Chris Gardner. The film stars Will Smith as Gardner, an on-and-off-homeless salesman-turned stockbroker.

The screenplay by Steven Conrad is based on the eponymous best-selling memoir written by Gardner with Quincy Troupe. The film was released on December 15, 2006, by Columbia Pictures. For his performance Smith received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe nomination.

Plot

In 1981, in San Francisco, the smart salesman and family man Chris Gardner invests the family savings in Osteo National bone-density scanners, an apparatus twice as expensive as an x-ray machine but with a slightly clearer image. This white elephant financially breaks the family, bringing troubles to his relationship with his wife Linda, who leaves him and moves to New York where she has received a job in a pizza parlor. She wishes to take their son Christopher with her, but Chris refuses because they both know that Linda will be unable to take care of him.

Without money or a wife, but totally committed to his son Christopher, Chris sees the chance to fight for a stockbroker internship position at Dean Witter, offering a more promising career at the end of a six month unpaid training period. There are nineteen other candidates for the one position. Meanwhile, he encounters many challenges and difficulties, including a period of homelessness and troubles with the IRS.

Spelling of "Happyness"

The word "Happyness" in the title is purposely spelled with a "y" instead of the correct "i". It has a personal meaning to Chris Gardner, upon whom the movie is based. In a radio interview with KPFA 94.1 FM, Gardner explained why:

"There was a place once in Oakland [Ca] near the MacArthur Park station that became very, very, very important to my son and I at the most challenging stage of our journey, and they spelled happiness with a 'y' and that's why it's spelled that way... It's personal [the spelling]. It's definitely personal. ...That particular place was a day-care center, and at this point in my life just getting my son into a day-care center was a major, major, major challenge and I had to learn about the food chain of day-care in our country. The top of that food chain is the au pair or 'the nanny' who is there 24/7 365 with your child. Then there's the licensed registered day-care center followed by the dependable babysitter, and at the bottom of that is something called a woman who keeps kids. Okay, she's not licensed, she's not registered, but she provided a service ...that for myself and a lot of other folks, for she not there, we could not have gone to work. So a step up for me from a woman who keeps kids, a couple of steps up, was a place called Happyness, that day-care center."

Principal cast

Production

The film was largely shot in San Francisco.[1]

A fake BART station was constructed in Duboce Park and removed after filming.[2]

Critical reception

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle observed, "The great surprise of the picture is that it's not corny . . . The beauty of the film is its honesty. In its outlines, it's nothing like the usual success story depicted onscreen, in which, after a reasonable interval of disappointment, success arrives wrapped in a ribbon and a bow. 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 other words, it all feels real."[3]

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film "a fairy tale in realist drag . . . the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw . . . It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness . . . How you respond to this man's moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith's and his son's performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams."[4]

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of a possible four stars and commented, "Will Smith is on the march toward Oscar . . . [His] role needs gravity, smarts, charm, humor and a soul that's not synthetic. Smith brings it. He's the real deal."[5]

In Variety, Brian Lowry said the film "is more inspirational than creatively inspired—imbued with the kind of uplifting, afterschool-special qualities that can trigger a major toothache . . . Smith's heartfelt performance is easy to admire. But the movie's painfully earnest tone should skew its appeal to the portion of the audience that, admittedly, has catapulted many cloying TV movies into hits . . . In the final accounting, [it] winds up being a little like the determined salesman Mr. Gardner himself: easy to root for, certainly, but not that much fun to spend time with."[6]

Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times stated, "Dramatically it lacks the layering of a Kramer vs. Kramer, which it superficially resembles . . . Though the subject matter is serious, the film itself is rather slight, and it relies on the actor to give it any energy. Even in a more modest register, Smith is a very appealing leading man, and he makes Gardner's plight compelling . . . The Pursuit of Happyness is an unexceptional film with exceptional performances . . . There are worse ways to spend the holidays, and, at the least, it will likely make you appreciate your own circumstances."[7]

In the St. Petersburg Times, Steve Persall graded the film B- and added, "[It] is the obligatory feel-good drama of the holiday season and takes that responsibility a bit too seriously . . . the film lays so many obstacles and solutions before its resilient hero that the volume of sentimentality and coincidence makes it feel suspect . . . Neither Conrad's script nor Muccino's redundant direction shows [what] lifted the real-life Chris above better educated and more experienced candidates, but it comes through in the earnest performances of the two Smiths. Father Will seldom comes across this mature on screen; at the finale, he achieves a measure of Oscar-worthy emotion. Little Jaden is a chip off the old block, uncommonly at ease before the cameras. Their real-life bond is an inestimable asset to the onscreen characters' relationship, although Conrad never really tests it with any conflict."[8]

National Review Online has named the film #7 in its list of 'The Best Conservative Movies'. Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity wrote, "this film provides the perfect antidote to Wall Street and other Hollywood diatribes depicting the world of finance as filled with nothing but greed."[9]

Box office

The film debuted at #1 at the North American box office, earning $27 million during its opening weekend and beating out heavily promoted films such as Eragon and Charlotte's Web. It was Will Smith's sixth consecutive #1 opening. The film grossed $162,586,036 in the US and Canada, nearly three times its production cost, and a further $141,700,000 in other markets, for a total worldwide box office of $304,286,036.

DVD sales

The film was released on DVD on March 27, 2007 and As of November 2007, US Region 1 DVD sales accounted for an additional $89,923,088 in revenue, slightly less than half of which was earned in its first week of release[10]. About 5,570,577 units have been sold, bringing in $90,582,602 in revenue.[11]

Awards and nominations

Trivia

The title relates to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", which are listed as "inalienable rights" in the United States Declaration of Independence.

The man seen walking across the street at the end of the movie while Chris and his son are walking away is the real-life Christopher Gardner. You can see Will Smith make a double take back at him.

See also

References

  1. ^ Sanders, Adrienne (2007-02-09), "Bay Area movies still rolling", San Francisco Business Times
  2. ^ Garchik, Leah (2005-09-19), "Leah Garchik column", San Francisco Chronicle
  3. ^ San Francisco Chronicle review
  4. ^ New York Times review
  5. ^ Rolling Stone review
  6. ^ Variety review
  7. ^ Los Angeles Times review
  8. ^ St. Petersburg Times review
  9. ^ Miller, John (February 23, 2009). "The Best Conservative Movies". National Review Online. Retrieved August 19, 2009.
  10. ^ The Pursuit of Happyness at TheNumbers.com
  11. ^ http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2006/PRHAP-DVD.php

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Pursuit of Happyness.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Pursuit_of_Happyness&oldid=329068623"