Pursuit of Happyness
Will Smith finally returns to where he left off with 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation – acting. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Independence Day or Bad Boys, those films are a betrayal of the inner actor Smith has shown with Degrees and Ali. In The Pursuit of Happyness we see a performance devoid of vanity and rich with grave emotions. It is a performance that makes you forget about Will Smith and see what Smith is capable of.
With this true story of Chris Gardner, a man without a college degree and a knack for mathematics, he perseveres in competing for an internship with Dean Witter Investments in the early 1980’s. He does so while raising his son and for awhile living in shelters and subway bathrooms in San Francisco. Gardner’s wife has left him and he has little money to get by. His life is shown to be a constant juggling act between day care, lack of funds, sleep, the internship and maintaining a happy face in spite of it all.
Happyness is not the do-gooder bio-pic Hollywood tends to roll out. It is overflowing with tension, the type of anxiety only people who have struggled with financial issues can feel. Smith’s Gardner never gets a break, the film is relentless in what the audience sees piled on him. Viewers are made to suffer right alongside Gardner and when he finally sees light at the end of the tunnel you don’t leap out of the seat, you sit there numb, feeling the weight lifted away. It may be one of the few films that is so punishing and well made that you may not want to sit through again yet implore others to see.
- Brian Tucker
The Good Shepherd
Robert De Niro exquisitely directs this look at the early years of the C.I.A. through the viewpoint of Edward Wilson and the effect it has on his life. Matt Damon plays Wilson with steel nerves, revealing little. Wilson seems like a robot, save for one scene in a college play where he poses as a female singer. He alienates a wife he never intended to marry, a son he loves but does not know and a deaf woman, in all likelihood, he would have ended up with.
Throughout Shepherd he is a stone, speaking in short sentences. He loses much of his life to help create the C.I.A. and help ensure the world’s safety – from World War II to the Cold War. It’s his dedication to this safety that builds the agency yet leaves him with a “life with no friends and not knowing who to trust.”
The cast also includes Alec Baldwin, Angelina Jolie, Billy Crudup, De Niro and Joe Pesci. It’s a fascinating, yet fictionalized, look into the groundwork of America’s intelligence service.
www.thegoodshephermovie.com
- Brian Tucker
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