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“Maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue. And maybe we can actually never have it...no matter what.”
What is life but a pursuit of happiness. Every day we continue to persist through the tiring life just to get that tiny sliver of happiness. The only reason why we are able to travel through the long, pitch-black tunnel that is life is because we believe there’s happiness waiting for us at the end.
If one can get it, they are even willing to do work that they don’t like. That’s how important happiness is. The movie is more about the struggle to achieve happiness than actually having it.
That’s why the movie ends when Chris Gardner’s struggle ends. The story shows that not every happy person is born happy, everybody has to work for it.
Introduction
Movie’s Name - The Pursuit of Happyness
Directed by - Gabriele Muccino
Genre - Biography, Drama
Language - English
Running Time - 1 hr 57 mins
Synopsis
Life's a struggle for single father Chris Gardner. Evicted from their apartment, he and his young son Christopher find themselves alone with no place to go. Even though Chris eventually lands a job as an intern at a prestigious brokerage firm, the position pays no money.
The pair must live in shelters and endure many hardships, but Chris refuses to give in to despair as he struggles to create a better life for himself and his son.
Movie Review
This movie is not simply a melodrama, it's a transparent and honest depiction of what life really is. It doesn’t follow the archetypal route of any other success story where the hero gains success after a few obstacles and then it’s all flowers and rainbows. It tells us that there’s no guarantee that you’ll succeed if you’ve struggled enough.
Life is full of disappointments. Even if you think that you’ve made it, you might actually still have a long way to go but that’s how life is, the struggle never truly ends.
The movie is all about the missed opportunities, the sure things that fall apart, the tiny achievements that seem worthless. But at the end of the day, they all amount to something. It's not all in vain.
Chris Gardner struggles and struggles hard to achieve his share of the American Dream. But not everyone is cut out for this struggle. Linda, Chris’s wife, crumbled under the financial pressure and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she left.
However, she believed in Chris. No matter how disappointing he was to her, he was a reliable father. So, she left her son with him.
The movie is full of fleeting ups and crushing downs. There is one particularly impactful scene when Chris, homeless and completely broke, has to stay in a subway rest room for a night with his son.
Lying on toilet paper with their belongings, we see Chris’s desperation to provide a roof for his son and also the part of him that just can’t take anymore of life’s beating.
The wrong spelling of happiness in the title is taken from a graffiti that Chris saw on the wall outside the daycare his son attended. This wrongly spelled happiness is the only happiness that he knows.
As we see Chris going through emotionally straining experiences without anyone to lean on, all we can do is cheer him on. During his internship too, being the only African-American guy, he was always asked to do trivial tasks like bringing coffee or parking a car, even if he was in the middle of his work.
But he had a lot more bigger things going on in his life that these small things couldn’t possibly weaken his resolution to give a better life to his son than the one he had.
The message of the movie is that people are rewarded for their hard work and not out of pity. Nobody pities nobody in the real world because they all have worries of their own.
If you’re determined to do something, then you have to do all you can to achieve it because nobody is going to hand it to you on a silver platter. Chris understood this very well. He never once thought to ask anyone for help because these circumstances were his own and only he could fix them.
Famous Quotes
“Don't ever let somebody tell you, you can't do something. Not even me. You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.”
“I still remember that moment. They all looked so damn happy to me. Why couldn't I look like that?”
“The next day after work, we just went to the beach. Far away from anything, everything. Just Christopher and me. Far away from buses and noise and a constant disappointment in my 10-gallon head...in myself. Because when I was young and I’d get an A on a history test or whatever, I’d get this good feeling about all the things I could be. And then I never became any of them.”
The Bottom Line
It’s a pretty stressful movie, as you would expect from a story of a person’s pursuit of happiness. But while it's stressful, it's also very motivating. If you’re going through a hard time in life, watching this movie will help you realise that the struggle is just a phase that you’ll definitely get out of someday, if you don’t give up and if you have enough determination.
IMDb ratings - 8 on 10
Written By - Sanjana Chaudhary
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