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There’s a little bit of January left, so I’ve got a few more movies with positive vibes about new beginnings and fresh starts to help blunt the new-year blues.
Today: 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness. Sure, we’ve all been down and out in our own ways, but have we ever been “sleeping in a public bathroom while doing an unpaid internship” down and out? This is the sitch Will Smith finds himself in, with his kindergartner son in tow, in this surprisingly unsentimental movie about building a new life from the very dregs of the old one.
This based-on-a-true-story movie is set in early-1980s San Francisco, just as the neoliberal project in the economic destruction of ordinary working people was getting underway. And it was still utterly plausible in 2006 — a couple years before the 2008 financial crisis! — given what I called in my 2006 review of the film “the train wreck of the American economy over the last two decades.” I’m about to watch it again tonight, almost two more decades on from the film. Yes, I expect optimism, because Smith’s desperate dad does succeed, on the small scale of his own life.
But I’m also expecting a stark reminder that life has been on a downslide for everyone except the very rich for almost my entire lifetime. And that the idea of one pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps was initially intended as satirical, a smackdown of the notion of such effort that is solely individual, because any personal success is necessarily going to be a result of a robust, collaborative society. Which we seem to have totally forgotten about.
Yikes, sorry! This was supposed to be positive…
US: stream on Peacock; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Prime; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See The Pursuit of Happyness at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
