Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Pursuit of Happyness
2006 · Gabriele Muccino · The Pursuit of Happyness on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the handheld camera chase Smith through streets and stations. (camera)
Phedon Papamichael works shoulder-mounted, staying with Gardner as he runs for trains and appointments. The frame keeps him moving through crowds of people who do not notice him.
Payoff: The film puts the labor of hurrying into your body instead of into dialogue.
Count how often Gardner is carrying a bone-density scanner. (setting)
The scanners are unsold inventory and a physical load at the same time. He hauls them onto buses, into offices and up stairs, and rarely gets to put one down.
Payoff: His debt has a weight and a shape, so you can see the size of it in every scene.
Watch Smith's face switch from client smile to exhaustion. (performance)
Smith puts a salesman's charm on for buyers and drops it the moment a door closes. The shame and the arithmetic show only in the gaps between those two faces.
Payoff: The performance carries the film's real work, showing you what all that politeness costs him.
Listen for the city noise dropping when father and son talk. (sound)
Traffic, transit and crowds run under nearly everything. The sound design pulls the din back for the private scenes, and Andrea Guerra's strings come in where the noise leaves.
Payoff: Quiet is the only shelter in this film, and you can hear it being handed out.
Notice how each day closes with one more thing lost. (cutting)
Hughes Winborne builds by accumulation, cutting small setbacks against a running clock: rent, the shrinking balance, the queue for a shelter bed, the unpaid hours at the internship.
Payoff: The rhythm makes you feel a man running hard to stay exactly where he already is.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what he is carrying, and what gets taken next. The film is built out of subtraction.