The Pursuit of Happyness is based upon the true story of self-made millionaire Chris Garner. Starring Will Smith in the title role opposite his real-life son Jayden, the movie was written by Steve Conrad and helmed by Gabriele Muccino. It chronicles the rise of Garder from his humble beginnings as a bone scanner salesman all the way to a successful Wall Street broker. The movie presents the viewer with all the trials and tribulations that he had to overcome, from a divorce, extreme poverty, and the eventual payoff that he got from his seemingly endless patience and perseverance in life.
In the film, we see that Gardner had a nuclear family at the beginning composed of himself, his wife, and his child. However, his family structure evolved to another stage after his wife left him and successfully filed for divorce. He then had to share custody of his son with his wife, forcing him to act as a single parent to his son during most times of the child’s life. There is no mention of any extended family members throughout the movie, which leads one to believe that Gardner may have deceased parents and was an only child.
When the movie begins, we are informed that both Gardner and his then-wife Linda were both breadwinners for the family. However, Linda was the one financially supporting the family through her waitressing job because Chris had made a bad business decision earlier by buying more bone scanning machines than he could actually sell. As with any family, his wife was tasked to take care of the emotional needs of the family. But she eventually suffered burnout and felt it best to tune out of the family in order to save herself from doing anything wrong to them. After all, she was tasked with most of the housework and child care as well. Since the primary financial representative of the family was not the father, there was some conflict between the husband and wife as to who had more decision-making controls over the family. Being the financial provider, Linda felt that she should have the final say. But Chris wanted to have a say as well, being the titular head of the household. Having only one biological offspring did not make their lives any easier, as both parents were concerned about the day-to-day living expenses that needed to be met. Using an assertive/democratic parental style, the boy was raised to be not actually shielded from the financial turmoil of his parents but rather as an involved, helpless individual. The child was reared the best way each parent knew how regardless of their gender, race, socio-economic status, or geographic location.
The behavior of the family is actually affected by their socioeconomic status in life. Having started out as a middle-class family, bad decisions saw their speedy decline into the lower class bracket of society. As Gardner struggled to prevent a further slide in their socioeconomic status, he found that he had no other choice but to hit rock bottom first. This caused him to be a very unhappy man whose heartbreak in life is clearly seen in the scene where the father and son had to spend the night in a public toilet on the subway. Since Chris was only an unpaid trainee at the brokering office, he had to keep his single-parent family together with only his savings and sales skills to rely upon. You see, Chris was in a very delicate situation. He was self-employed, and yet, being unable to sell his wares successfully, he could be considered to be unemployed as well. Since Christopher, his son, was still not of school age, the only education the child was getting was at a poor man’s daycare center run by a Chinese woman who could not spell the word Happiness properly, hence the misspelled title of the movie. It was important to Chris Gardner that his son get some sort of education because no matter how financially tight it got for him, he always found a way to get the bill for the daycare center paid off.
It did not take long for Chris to realize that his family was in financial distress. Unfortunately for him, his early efforts to pull his family out of the mess were unsuccessful. It cost him his marriage and almost cost him custody of his son as well. The only response Chris had to all his failures in life was perseverance and a daring-do attitude. Sometimes it worked; most of the time, it did not. The only thing I can say is that today, a lot of American families are probably going through what Chris Gardner went through, and we can only hope that they all end up with a variation of Chris’ happy ending in the movie.
Having reviewed the movie thoroughly, I have concluded that Mr. Gardner found himself in the center of a Social – Conflict Sociological Theory. This can be clearly seen and defined as his wife abandons him, his job is described as a cutthroat competitive world wherein undercutting people is an acceptable method of getting ahead, and his co-workers and ex-wife simply do not care about him nor help him to achieve success. In order to improve the family’s functioning, I would have advised Linda to stay married to Chris in order to give him that moral support and goal to succeed in life. Having to raise a son alone is a hard job but having a wife and son to support works wonders for the downtrodden.
If I could have spoken to a member of this family, I would have spoken to Linda. I would have told her that nobody can just ship out of a family. A family is not a military unit that you can retire from at the end of your tour of duty. It is a lifelong commitment that requires unquestioning love, loyalty, and cooperation, in order to make it work. In the end, all hardships do have an end. How you get to the end is not important. What does matter is what the travel towards the end has taught you about life, love, and commitment in general?
Work Cited
Black, Todd (Producer). Muccino, Gabriele (Dir.). (2006). The Pursuit of Happyness.United States: Columbia Pictures Corporation.