The Pursuit of Happyness.

"The Pursuit of Happyness may not be one of the great films about American life lived at or near the poverty line, like Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "But for a movie conceived and executed in the mainstream Hollywood idiom, it has uncommon depth and honesty. And the thing it's honest about is the embarrassment and humiliation of being poor, especially in a place like San Francisco, where the steep hills provide an apt metaphor for the city's income gap. It's honest about something else too - that money can indeed buy you happiness. Just ask anybody who's ever had money and then lost it."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "How you respond to this man's moving story may depend on whether you find [Will] 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."

Updated through 12/19.

"[T]he picture's ending - which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it - is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters," argues Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "The Pursuit of Happyness, even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture - like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar."

"Success is all that matters in The Pursuit of Happyness because it's the one idea that hip-hop artists have learned they can sell to America, and the world, unilaterally," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Worse, The Pursuit of Happyness suggests that the drive for success is what defines Americans. In other words, Smith is no longer merely a figurine fronting the Hollywood institution; he now owns a piece of the plantation."

"If you've seen the schlocky trailer... you've seen a better version of the actual film," argues Toddy Burton in the Austin Chronicle.

Mick LaSalle, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, disagrees: "The great surprise of the picture is that it's not corny."

Kevin Crust, writing in the Los Angeles Times, finds it "an unexceptional film with exceptional performances."

"We know the film will uplift us in the end or it wouldn't have been made, so why must the journey be so oversimplified and visually pedestrian?" wonders Aaron Hillis at the Reeler.

Update, 12/19: "Chris Gardner changes his life by accepting an unpaid internship with Dean Witter," notes Nathaniel R. "At the end of this grueling internship the company chooses one of its twenty unpaid interns to hire.... This is an underdog story but it completely glosses over a cynical and genius move on the part of big business. They feed off of working stiffs without having to reimburse them, and Hollywood is there with an 'amen'."

Posted by dwhudson at December 16, 2006 3:46 PM