The film follows Chris Gardner’s life as he falls from poverty, capturing the chaos and struggles he faces as a single father who will do whatever it takes to make his (adorable) son happy. Will Smith and his son Jaden Smith give a brilliant performance that will keep you glued to the screen.
This family-friendly film is a breath of fresh air in a fast-paced world of chaos and materialism. It allows the audience to identify with the hardships and failures that Chris goes through. From sleeping in public toilets to chasing buses, the protagonist’s efforts inspire the audience.
Chris’s optimism and frankness in difficult situations always move the audience and bring tears to their eyes. Chris’s famous words encouraging his son to never give up are even more inspiring:
Never let anyone tell you you can’t do it. Not even me… If someone can’t do it themselves, they’ll tell you you can’t do it either. If you want something, go get it. That’s it.
Furthermore, this movie reminds us that life is too short to indulge in happiness to the fullest. In this fast-paced world, we often forget to be grateful, and this movie reminds us of that. Reality may knock you down, but it is up to you to deal with it. For me, this movie reminds me to be grateful for being with the people I love.
Overall, the movie teaches us that happiness is something we often strive for when we miss out on the little “bliss” in life. Personally, this message from the movie was exactly what I needed to hear.
The film tells the life story of Chris Gardner, following several key events during his nearly year-long battle with homelessness and unemployment. The film chronicles Gardner’s life as a salesman whose financial struggles ultimately lead to his separation from his wife, played by Thandie Newton. Gardner is left alone to take care of his five-year-old son, Christopher, and as things go from bad to worse, the film shows how Gardner rushes to get his son to preschool and has to run around to different homeless shelters at night. Gardner puts his remaining energy into his only hope, an internship at Dean Witter Reynolds, as he works to become a full-time stockbroker at the company and get a paying job.
There is a joke about God in the film: A devout drowning man hoped that God would save him. A boat passed by, but he refused to be rescued, saying, God will come to save me. A second boat passed by, but he still refused to be rescued for the same reason. Later, the drowning man drowned. In heaven, he was not convinced and asked God, “Almighty Lord, why don’t you come to save me?” God replied, “I sent two boats to save you.”
As Hemingway said in the preface of The Sun Also Rises, most people in this world are confused. We comfort ourselves only because there may be a God sitting in heaven.
I was so teary-eyed when I saw the end. Although the inspirational purpose of the film is so exposed and abrupt. In the early 1980s, five years after the end of the Vietnam War, the society began to slowly recover from the depression of the war. Black people. Broken marriages. Not well educated. The protagonists with these backgrounds are enough to highlight the cruel reality of contemporary American society. Emerson once said that in the United States, there will never be equality in spirit or wealth. But looking around, everyone is smiling and looks so damn happy.
There are as many American dreams as there are Americans. Happiness. Jefferson mentioned this word thirteen times in the Declaration of Independence. At that moment, the great American founding father believed that this was a dream guided by God, so they took up their swords and guns and stopped singing “God Save the Queen”. Two hundred years have passed, Jefferson has become the portrait on the US dollar bill, but happiness is still not circulated. The government and philanthropists provide people with milk and food, and provide temporary housing, but they still cannot give people the illusion of happiness.
Life is bitter, tears are salty. Selling those white “time machines” is not enough to maintain a good life, but it is enough to attract the attention of hippie girls and mental patients. Globalization shrinks people, and movies magnify them. Antonioni’s words fully describe the charm of film art. We have lost the focus of attention, but we still have a sufficient appetite for money and material things.
In the first book of Kundera I read in college, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is a sentence that says: Life often makes us feel hard, and allows us to witness countless times the distortion and deformation of life under various pressures. So we saw that the father who was usually polite and could not tolerate the graffiti of “fuck” on the wall of the kindergarten was forced by life to be like a mad dog: he did not pay the taxi fare, quarreled with his friends for fourteen dollars, and was rude and rude to cut in line. Struggling at the bottom of society for too long, the instinct of survival inadvertently castrated virtue.
I envy others for their exquisite lives, but my own lives are so violent. Happiness knocks gently on the door, while misfortune and disaster kick it open violently. Therefore, we often say that we miss love and happiness, while disasters and misfortunes will keep pestering you like little hooligans on the roadside, and they usually won’t pass by carelessly.
For weak people, being victimized is a habit. In the days of peace and stability, we lose the ability to discern the disasters and crises ahead. We don’t care because we usually feel that we will not be as unlucky as that father.
Living is really hard, but there are always reasons to persist. I had a long talk with a female friend last night, and she said that if she didn’t have this or that concern, she might as well die sitting on the rails. I actually wanted to tell her that the more meaningless life is, the more worth living it. This is Camus’ words, full of our provocation to the vague fate arranged by God. Nietzsche said arrogantly that God is dead, but I gently said that God just left heaven. He wants to give way to a specific happiness and ideal in our hearts.
Just like Will Smith in the movie kept telling his children and wife, we will definitely get better, we will definitely get better. When playing basketball, he also said, kid, you must protect your dreams. At that moment, I saw that a happy family and children are his true beliefs – there is no red tape literary tone, only a father’s warm winter sun.
God is different for everyone. God is a girl, God is a gun. Sometimes, they all carry a certain realistic meaning of salvation. When everything in life begins to abandon you, when you begin to get tired of that God always using things like gospel and original sin to escape and shirk responsibility, fortunately, we who are strong will always find a God sitting in heaven.
