The Pursuit of Happyness

The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical drama film based on Chris Gardner's nearly one-year struggle with homelessness. Directed by Gabriele Muccino, the film features Will Smith as Gardner, an on-and-off-homeless salesman-turned stockbroker. Smith's real-life son Jaden Smith co-stars, making his film debut as Gardner's son Christopher Jr.

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

[edit]Plot

In 1981, in San Francisco, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) invests his family's savings in portable bone-density scanners which he tries to demonstrate and sell to doctors. The investment proves to be a white elephant which financially breaks the family and as a result, his wife Linda (Thandie Newton) leaves him with their son Christopher (Jaden Smith) and moves to New York. While downtown trying to sell one of his scanners, Chris meets a manager for Dean Witter and impresses him by solving a Rubik's Cube during a short cab ride. Chris does not have enough money for the cab fare and flees the cab driver into a subway station where he barely escapes the cab driver but loses one of his bone scanners in the process. This new relationship with the Dean Witter manager earns him the chance to become an intern stockbroker. Despite arriving there unkempt and shabbily dressed due to an emergency, Chris is offered the internship. Chris is further set back when his bank account is garnished by the IRS for unpaid taxes, and he and his young son are evicted. As a result they are homeless, and are forced at one point to stay in a bathroom at a subway station. Motivation drives him to find the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, which has a homeless shelter primarily for single mothers and their children. Due to demand for the limited rooms, Chris must frantically race from his internship work early each afternoon in order to land a place in line. Chris finds the bone scanner that he lost in the subway station from a demented man who believes it to be a time machine and it is now damaged, but Chris finally repairs it. Disadvantaged by his limited work hours, and knowing that maximizing his client contacts and profits is the only way to earn the one paid position that he and his 19 competitors are fighting for, Chris develops a number of ways to make phone sales calls more efficiently. He also reaches out to potential high value customers, defying protocol. One sympathetic prospect takes him and his son to a professional football game. Regardless of Chris's challenges, he never reveals his lowly circumstances to his co-workers, even going so far as to lend one of his bosses five dollars for a cab, a sum he can barely afford.

Concluding his internship, Chris is called into a meeting with his managers. His work has paid off and he is offered the position. Fighting back tears, he rushes to his son's daycare, hugging him. They walk down the street, joking with each other and are passed by a man in a business suit (the real Chris Gardner in a cameo). The epilogue reveals that Chris went on to form his own multi-million dollar brokerage firm.