The Pursuit of Happyness: Critic Reviews

The Pursuit of Happyness speaks eloquently to the anxieties of our own time, when staying afloat, let alone movin' on up, has rarely been tougher.

A fairy tale in realist drag, The Pursuit of Happyness is the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw.

An old-fashioned Hollywood heartwarmer.

Thankfully, humor leavens the dark journey, and little Jaden and his jokes go a long way to warm our hearts.

The Pursuit of Happyness is the biography of a real guy named Christopher Gardner, whom Will Smith, charming and bright, embodies to the fingertips.

It's a fine film, with a portrait of fatherhood that feels scuffed and driven and real.

The movie, the first English-language film directed by Italian Gabriele Muccino, is too emotionally slick to work, too visually glib to have an impact.

Smith may be the closest Hollywood has to a modern Cary Grant, an instantly likable actor comfortable in every role he attempts.

The Pursuit of Happyness goes beyond tugging at our heartstrings. It plucks them, strokes them, strums them, plays them for all they're worth. That's both the strength and the weakness of this inspirational drama.

The whole thing works. This earnest, modest, sweet little ode to paternal love is meant to warm the cockles of our hearts in a season overrun with cockle-warming, and even a recalcitrant Scrooge may sniff back a few salty droplets.

Few on-screen father-son relationships have felt more authentic than that depicted by Will Smith and his real-life son in The Pursuit of Happyness.

Pursuit of Happyness isn't just a balm intended to heal negative depictions of AWOL African-American fathers. The movie pays respect to all single parents striving to do the right thing with few resources.

The movie is an economic cliff-hanger.

Smith is terrific and moving in this film. The film itself is more conventional. Yet it's better-crafted and less obviously ruthless in the pathos department than you'd expect.

Smith is resourceful in the role, though the story stretches one's credulity about his character's resourcefulness.

A movie star who can slip easily into high-beam mode, Smith gives a restrained and nuanced turn.

Smith hasn't delivered this kind of earnest, emotionally raw performance since Ali, and his Chris Gardner is every bit as complex.

The Pursuit of Happyness attempts to be a warm movie with a good message. But its message is substantially skewed and the resulting warmth factor is decidedly low.

This is Smith as you've never seen him -- an unsure, struggling, frustrated guy trying to hold together his family and failing.

... The Pursuit of Happyness winds up being a little like the determined salesman Mr. Gardner himself: easy to root for, certainly, but not that much fun to spend time with.

Winter's coming in hard, but this season's leading cause of the sniffles is going to be The Pursuit of Happyness, a viral blast of the American Dream. It's Rocky with a briefcase.

For anybody who ever has been at the bottom, or feared they were headed there, it's a reminder that there's no guarantee of luck or happiness in the Declaration of Independence -- just the right to pursue it.

The Pursuit of Happyness can't imagine anything worse than being poor. Except maybe being surrounded by poor people.

For an expensive, mainstream Hollywood movie, The Pursuit of Happyness is crisscrossed with mixed motives.

Some people will see The Pursuit of Happyness as a glorification of capitalism, but the movie is much less about 'getting' than it is about 'not having.'