The Pursuit of Happyness

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 12:41 am

Recently, I watched this movie and was impressed by the storyline an performances. I therefore look for a good synopsis and put here for you to enjoy.

“Set in San Francisco in 1981, the film centers around Chris Gardner (Will Smith), a 30-year old, clever, yet unsuccessful, salesman of expensive bone-density scanners. Chris invested most of his and his wife’s money into the scanners, which he eventually finds extremely difficult to sell (and difficult to keep from being stolen by hippies and bums). He refers to this period of his life as “Being Stupid,” in that he wrongly trusted a hippie with watching one of them while going for a job interview. Despite Christopher’s valiant attempts to help keep the family afloat, he is faltering; the rent on their apartment is far past due, and his car is towed after Chris defaults on paying over a dozen parking tickets. His wife Linda (Thandie Newton) is unhappy and buckling under the constant strain of financial pressure, as her paychecks are the family’s primary source of income. The only thing keeping the couple’s marriage together is their five-year-old son Christopher (Jaden Smith).

One day, Chris meets a well off man (Geoff Callan) who reveals himself to be a stock broker for the Dean Witter brokerage firm. Impressed, Gardner seeks an interview with Dean Witter as an intern. Although he has no college training (Chris entered the US Navy after high school), his high-level math skills allow him to solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle in an impressively short amount of time, impressing Jay Twistle (Brian Howe), the person in charge of the intern hiring process, to the point that he arranges Chris an interview. Upon hearing that her husband is going “From salesman to intern – backwards”, Linda is no longer able to cope with her unhappiness and their poor financial situation. She walks out on Chris, taking Christopher with her.

Unwilling to be separated from his son, Chris picks Christopher up from his daycare in Chinatown before Linda can. Chris complains about a sign outside the daycare center misspelling “happiness” as “happyness”, hence the spelling of the film’s title. Linda is going to move to New York and wants to take Christopher with her. However, Chris insists that he wants to keep the boy, and Linda accepts his offer. Just before his Dean Witter interview, however, Chris is hit with two setbacks: he is being evicted from his apartment in a week unless he comes up with the rent, and he ends up spending a night in jail for failure to pay his parking tickets. After being released the next morning, Chris runs from the courthouse to his interview at Dean Witter’s offices, unshaven, unkempt and dressed in painter’s clothes. Nevertheless, he gets the internship, although he is chagrined to learn that it is unpaid.

Periodically able to sell all of the half-dozen remaining bone density scanners for quick money, Chris and young Christopher move into a low-rent motel, although Chris is still unable to pay his rent on time due to a notice about Chris’ unpaid taxes and that the government took his last six hundred dollars from his bank account leaving only twenty-one dollars left. Undaunted, Chris pursues his Dean Witter internship as a way out of financial struggle: at the end of the six-month internship program, only one intern out of the twenty in the program will be chosen to become a full-time paid employee, and Chris is determined to be that one. Chris eventually finds one of his scanners in the hands of a bum who stole it. Chris tries to sell it to one last doctor to get some money, but he is upset to learn it has been broken. The Gardners are evicted from the motel, and they are forced to spend the night in a BART station public restroom.

The next morning, Chris and Christopher attempt to find themselves a shelter, eventually happening upon the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The shelter operates on a first-come-first-serve basis, so every evening after work, Chris is forced to race across town to pick Christopher up, take the bus across town, and run to catch a place in line with the other homeless people. Chris continues to fix the scanner sacrificing time and sleep. Christopher of course does not like the situation (and on one occasion they lose one of his few toys; the Captain America doll on the film poster) but he is understanding, and still loves his father.

Chris places added energy into going out of his way to attract potential Dean Witter clients (including joining a potential customer at a football game; Chris and Christopher have a break by being invited in the customer’s box). Chris finally fixes the scanner and sells it for two hundred dollars. In the end, Gardner’s hard work pays off: he is awarded a full-time job with Dean Witter which causes him to choke up and hold back his tears. As he leaves the office after hearing the good news, he starts crying as he walks into a crowd of people. Chris runs to his son’s daycare center and embraces him. The film ends with Chris and his son telling jokes to one another as they start walking down a street. This is when the actual Chris Gardner makes a cameo appearance. The film then explains that Chris went on to become a highly successful stock broker, eventually starting his own firm.”