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Column
'Pursuit of Happyness' and Betty Hutton
by Scott Holleran
March 16, 2007
Burbank, California—One of last year's best pictures, The Pursuit of Happyness, premieres on DVD later this month and the disc is a keeper. The movie, fueled by Steve Conrad's strong script, dramatizes one parent's heartbreaking reach for the best within.
He's played by Will Smith, who provides narration in character as a father whose weary wife (Thandie Newton, hanging by a thread that thins with each scene) abdicates her responsibility to husband and child, leaving them to face hardship after hardship. The Pursuit of Happyness, based on events in Chris Gardner's life, casts Smith as a man attempting a remarkable realignment of his values, his goals and his life.
In a time before cellular phones and voice mail, struggling father and aspiring businessman Gardner (with Smith's son, Christopher, as his kid) aims to think his way out of poverty, adopting the optimism inspired by a Founding Father's noble phrase from the Declaration of Independence. "How did Thomas Jefferson know to put pursuit in?" the destitute Gardner wonders, embracing the idea that happiness is earned.
The Pursuit of Happyness deserves every second of an emotional and thoroughly involving progression, which takes Gardner from ditching taxi fares through a top internship and, possibly, a job. The capitalist is finally portrayed without malice; men of profit pull for Gardner from the beginning—as an act of benevolence, not charity—whether encouraging him when he's working a Rubik's Cube or helping him find a shoe when he's literally knocked off his feet.
Hippies, moochers and the Internal Revenue Service are the movie's villains, looting Gardner's property and incessantly disrupting his forward march. This is what life's like for too many men—who are often hurt, demoralized and lost in a welfare state that favors women and children—yet guys like Gardner strive to be honorable. As he cold calls his way through internship, Gardner improves himself and—neither letting go of his goals nor giving into a sense of entitlement—chooses to become a self-made man. With lilting music that rises like the character, and San Francisco's rarely depicted producers, The Pursuit of Happyness is a wonderfully American movie.
The picture is directed by Gabriele Muccino (the original The Last Kiss), who provides DVD commentary and is the subject of the 17-minute Making Pursuit: An Italian Take on the American Dream, which also explores the creative relationship between Smith and Muccino. A seven minute piece on Smith and his son, who form the story's bond, is honest.
Other DVD bits include a Rubik's Cube feature (six minutes) with people called speed-cubers who solve the "string of patterns called algorithms" in blindfolds, with chopsticks, while riding a unicycle and with one hand. The Man Behind the Movie, a 12-minute conversation with the real Chris Gardner that's not particularly deep, is informative. It's an excellent DVD.
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Star Notes
Betty Hutton, the 86-year-old song and dance firecracker, died this week—another loss from Hollywood's Golden Age. The spitfire blonde made several classic pictures, including Preston Sturges' The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and uncorked an unstoppable energy in a string of Forties pictures.
Blazing the trail for another spirited blonde screen legend, box office champ Doris Day, Betty Hutton memorably played sharpshooter Annie Oakley opposite Howard Keel in Metro Goldwyn Mayer's screen adaptation of the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950). She also starred in popular movies such as The Perils of Pauline.
She was a flying trapeze circus performer in Cecil B. DeMille's Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), an entertaining—and underestimated—spectacle starring Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, Dorothy Lamour and Gloria Grahame, with Jimmy Stewart as a sheepish clown named Buttons. In the company of that formidable cast, Betty Hutton stormed under the Big Top like a pro—an irresistible live wire—and, as Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne demonstrated in a breathless interview with Miss Hutton in 2000, she remained that way.
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RELATED LINKS
• DVD: The Pursuit of Happyness
• Index of Scott Holleran's Columns |
