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Blogs by Jerome Parisse
The art of happiness 12/16/2010 6:36:51 PM
I watched The Pursuit of Happyness yesterday, the 2006 movie by director Gabriele Muccino. I saw it in Chinese. It was fun to hear Will Smith speak Chinese, but that’s not my point here. The title of the movie struck me. Not because of the “y” in happyness, which comes from a spelling mistake on a street poster, but because of the similarity of the title with a novel by Douglas Kennedy. But this is where the similarity ends. Both stories are very different. In Kennedy’s novel, Sara, an independent, smart young woman, falls in love with Jack Malone, a U.S. Army journalist just back from defeated Germany. This is the beginning of a beautiful, yet tragic, love story. The book is wonderfully written (Kennedy at his best) and uses McCarthy’s post-war witch-hunt as background, which makes it even more interesting. The pursuit of Happyness, on the other hand, is the story of Christopher Gardner, a black American man struggling to make both ends meet, with a wife and a son to look after. Very soon, his wife leaves him, and covered by heavy debts ranging from unpaid parking tickets to rent, bad investments, and taxes, Gardner starts sleeping on the streets with his son. He manages however to enter a brokerage firm as intern before being offered a full-time job. This is a classic story based on the American values of entrepreneurship, persistence, money and self-made wonder. Very well. But this is where I start to question the title of the film. There is no denying that money contributes to happiness, and were we in Gardner’s situation, we would be depressed or suicidal. Gardner isn’t. By the end of the movie, all is well: he is offered a permanent position, and is making millions. What about his wife? She is not mentioned anymore. What about his heart? What about his boy, seeing his parents yell at each other, having his mother walk away on them, his father being treated like a piece of rubbish and sleeping on the streets? Zilch. The movie ends on a simple note mentioning that a few years later Gardner founds his own company and, after selling a minority stake in it, earns millions. This is where I want to throw up.
