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.
Once you have seen it
Track everything taken from Gardner, in the order it goes. (structure)
Steven Conrad's script strips money, housing, marriage and dignity one at a time while holding a single pursuit in front of him. The rise is compressed into the last movement.
Payoff: The design is subtraction, so the release at the end has to carry a whole year of loss.
Look at the misspelled word outside the day-care. (setting)
Happyness is painted on the wall where his son spends his days. Gardner notices the error and asks about it. Muccino keeps putting the sign back in the frame.
Payoff: A promise written wrong by the institution meant to keep it stands in plain sight the whole film.
Watch Newton's Linda in the scenes before she goes. (performance)
Thandie Newton plays a woman ground down by the same conditions, investing short scenes with hardness and hurt. The script gives her pressure to apply rather than a life of her own.
Payoff: What the film leaves out of her is part of what keeps Gardner's story so clean.
Watch the restroom door, and who is holding it shut. (staging)
The subway station restroom becomes the night's shelter. Muccino stages it small, lit from outside, with Gardner's own body doing the work of a lock while his son sleeps.
Payoff: The lowest point in the story gets played as an act of parenting rather than as despair.
Carry this in: Watch what he is carrying, and what gets taken next. The film is built out of subtraction.