The Pursuit of Happyness
Review by Lisa Ann Cockrel | posted 12/15/2006
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Many years ago (okay, many, many years ago), Socrates was talking to a friend, Aristippus, who was advocating self-gratification as the path to a happy life. Socrates was unconvinced by his friend's claims and countered with a story called The Choice of Heracles, which he attributed to the earlier sophist Prodicus.
In the story, the demi-god Heracles enters adulthood and comes to a crossroads. Two women join him there, each urging him to take one of the opposing paths. One of the women is fashionable and cheery and runs ahead on the easy road of self-gratification, encouraging Heracles to spend life doing precisely what he wants, deliberating only about the best means to do this with as little effort as possible. Her friends call her happiness; her enemies call her vice (or pleasure).
Will Smith and his real-life son, Jaden, are the co-stars
The second woman is sober and reserved, perhaps a bit frumpy. She appeals via her words more than by her appearance. She warns that the initial appeal of vice and pleasure eventually fade into nothing worth having; it certainly doesn't lead to a happy life. But the second woman's road, fraught with work and self-denial though it may be, is the way to achievement and respect and a truly happy life. Her name? Virtue.
The Choice of Heracles has provided much fodder for western artists in the years since it was first told. And in some ways, Will Smith's latest movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, can be seen as part of this conversation. What hath the Prince of Bel-Air to do with Athens, you ask? Bear with me.
The Pursuit of Happyness tells the mostly true story of Chris Gardner (Smith), a San Francisco salesman of high-density bones scanners. With high hopes and the knowledge he would be the only Bay-area distributor, he spent his life savings buying the devices only for the industry to find them an unnecessary expense. He lugs a machine—which looks like a large sewing machine in its case, or perhaps a time machine, depending on your perspective—from hospital to hospital with little sales success.
Thandie Newton as Linda, Chris's wife
This life is a hard one. And Gardner's wife, Linda (Thandie Newton) is dissolving under its pressures. Together this couple is at sort of crossroads. And is there not a certain solace to be found in bitterness and anger? These are the pleasures to which she selfishly flees, as she leaves the marriage. Chris is left alone to care for their young son (played by Jaden Smith, the real-life son of Will Smith and his wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith). A faded and forgotten plaque sits mockingly in the entryway to their home, "With Joy We Greet You."
With doomed precision, Gardner's life falls apart. Taxes, overdue parking tickets, unpaid rent, eviction from their apartment. The details are important in this story if we are ever going to buy into the outlandish hope that presents itself on the horizon—an unpaid internship with a tiny chance for a job with a big salary. And of course, he goes for it.
Chris frets about the future … and his son
As Gardner says via voiceover at one point, "This part of my life is called running." And the pursuit in The Pursuit of Happyness often plays out in a quite literal manner—with Chris running to catch the bus or to recover a stolen bone density scanner (if you ask me, one of the thieves looks suspiciously like Rebecca St. James in hippie garb), or to make a meeting. He is running against the odds. And his efforts embody certain modern American virtues like dogged determination and idealism and hope.
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