PG-13 

Will Smith’s new movie. “The Pursuit of Happyness” is, despite its bright, shiny title, a dark and melancholy story. It is also a cautionary tale about the state of contemporary American filmmaking. Hollywood today is rich with very real, truly talented actors—the lineup is almost as impressive as it was a generation ago in the early 1970s—but they lack the kinds of scripts that catapulted their older counterparts, such as Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro and Diane Keaton, to stardom.

Count Will Smith among them. He is an astonishingly charismatic presence. Name his predecessors, Ron O’Neal or Richard Roundtree or Cary Grant, I don’t care—the man holds the screen with the kind of confidence and openness that we have come to expect from the very best of screen actors. And Smith does not make a false move in this film. Nor, for that matter, does his son, Jaden Smith.

But the whole of “The Pursuit of Happyness” is quite another matter. The movie relies, cynically, on our almost Pavlovian desire to respond positively to films about the triumph of overcoming adversity, but its pursuit of that response is clumsy, clichéd and lazy. The script is redundant, even annoying. The handful of people I saw the movie with made hardly a peep during the show, and when the film was over they all left in a hurry. As for me, I kept looking at my watch.

Smith plays Chris Gardner, and when we first meet him he is trying unsuccessfully to sell a bone density scanning device to doctors and hospitals. He’s more than just a salesman, though, because he and his wife Linda (Thandie Newton) have sunk all their life savings into the machine, which apparently nobody wants.

Thus begins Gardner’s long, long spiral downward. He and Linda are going broke, even though she is pulling double shifts at a local factory. Linda soon can’t take any more of Chris’s failure, though, and so she announces she is leaving him.

Given that the story is supposed to make us feel for Chris’s struggles as a single father, and to sympathize with his heroic efforts to keep he and his son together, the mother here must be dispatched fairly quickly. The screenwriter (Steve Conrad) turns to a very old and tired trick by turning Linda into a shrew. She heckles Chris unmercifully and at times appears to be an indifferent mother. This is an ugly thing to do, but it is done only to make us not miss her when she leaves. Indeed, little Chris Jr. only asks about his mother twice after she goes. So here we have another great actress forced to take a role that is not worthy of her talents, and which is also a mere plot device to allow the male star to take command of the picture.

After Linda leaves, Chris (and the audience) endures a string of misfortune that would try the patience of Job. He and his son are tossed out of their apartment, and then the hotel they are staying in, because they have no money. At the same time, the smart and resourceful Chris lands an internship at Dean Witter, which could get him a job as a stock broker, but doesn’t pay any money for six months.

During this time he has one of his bone scanning devices stolen (selling them is the only way he can make money), and then another is lost, and then he is hit by a car, he loses his shoe and must return to the Dean Witter class without it, he is asked to do a favor for his boss at Dean Witter that causes him to miss a crucial appointment, people borrow money from him when he can least afford it, and on and on.

Now, all this may be real—Chris Gardner is a real person, and the story here is supposed to be true—but it doesn’t make for compelling drama. I found it frustrating and redundant. There was also an air of unbelievability to the proceedings—despite being homeless Chris has a fresh suit to wear to the office every day, and he and his son never appear dirty or frayed. During the day the child is placed in a small daycare center, which isn’t cheap. And Chris Jr. handles everything from getting kicked out of the hotel to living in a homeless shelter to having to sleep in a subway bathroom for a night with great aplomb. The adult Chris tries to make everything that happens to them an adventure, but this also squeezes any real drama out of the story. If this is true, some of it had to be harrowing, and the audience doesn’t get to feel it.

The filmmakers also make a strange, self-defeating decision. They set the story in the early 1980s, which is the timeframe when the real events took place. But this constricted them. Director Gabriele Muccino filmed the story in the beautiful city of San Francisco, but we’re not allowed to really see the city at all. The camera stays in back alleys and the actors are tightly framed in their shots. Otherwise we’d see the modern cars or the outside advertisements or the 2006 skyline. It may also be the reason why Muccino has Smith running all the time; by keeping the camera moving you can’t see the background.

Here is another large-scale Hollywood drama that will play very well on DVD. It’s a TV movie, with big, glittering movie stars at the center, waiting for a script worthy of what they have to offer.