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EW review: 'Happyness' is terrific

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- Will Smith doesn't seem the likeliest candidate to play a desperate, struggling man. Whatever the role (love coach, alien fighter, Ali), he projects speed and good times, an almost aerobic self-confidence.

But in "The Pursuit of Happyness," which is set in San Francisco in 1981, at the dawn of the age of go-go capitalism, Smith doesn't just wear a few flecks of gray in his hair. He slows himself down, playing a man who awakens to the reality that life is nickel-and-diming him to death. It's a beautiful and understated performance, one that hums with a richer, quieter music than Smith has mustered before.

What hooks you in this shrewdly touching movie, based on a true story, is how specific it is about one man's economic perils. Smith's Chris Gardner is an earnest fellow in his late 30s who sells medical equipment -- or, rather, one particular item, a high-density bone scanner that he hawks, with middling success, on a freelance basis. His mistake was to invest his savings in these contraptions, and now he's stuck, toting them around town like oversize typewriters. (Watch the movie's trailer )

His marriage has fallen apart, and when the prickly, impatient Linda (Thandie Newton) takes off, leaving Chris and his young son (played by Smith's son Jaden with a sly-eyed lack of fuss that matches nicely with his father's), he applies for the internship program at Dean Witter, where he'll compete to be a stockbroker. Smith makes Chris a go-getter with a hint of sadness -- a bit of a fuddy-duddy, but a smart, dogged one. (He gets his foot in the door by solving a Rubik's Cube.)

In "The Pursuit of Happyness," we don't just know Chris' dreams. We know his bank account, his tally of parking tickets, his back taxes. The fact that he's African-American is there at the margins -- he would surely have gone to college had he come from a less hardscrabble background -- but the real issue is the subtler one of class mobility in America. Since the internship is unsalaried, Chris is forced to survive by other measures, and what this means is that the job is really geared to people who've already attained middle-class solidity. Chris has to pretend to be something he's not, and the power of Smith's acting is in the gentle, mounting fury with which he absorbs a hundred misperceptions and slights.

As compelling as the film is, it does have a rather single-minded, one-ordeal-after-another, Murphy's Law quality. Yet the director, Italy's Gabriele Muccino, lends a humane touch even to the running joke of Chris getting his bone scanners stolen, and the plot is an inexorable chain of money logic: Chris' escape from a cabbie he can't afford to pay, his looming tax crisis, his move to a hotel and, finally, a homeless shelter. The lower he falls, the more Smith endows him with a ragged nobility and will.

"The Pursuit of Happyness" speaks eloquently to the anxieties of our own time, when staying afloat, let alone movin' on up, has rarely been tougher.

EW Grade: B+

'The Good German'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

"The Good German" works better for those who think meta.

On one level, Steven Soderbergh's latest, elegant movie-loving project is a period-piece drama set in Berlin at the end of World War II, where U.S. war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney) gets embroiled all over again with an old German flame who still sets men on fire.

Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett) used to be a soft girl until the war made her hard (when Jake first sees her again, she has taken up with Tobey Maguire as a conscience-free black marketer). Jake used to be a passionate guy until the war made him bitter.

Secrets are involved, and double-dealings, and a rich supporting cast, including Beau Bridges as a bushy American colonel, Ravil Isyanov as a slippery Russian general, and "Deadwood's" Robin Weigert as Lena's lusty roommate, stealing every scene she's in, sometimes just by chewing a sandwich. The air is perfumed with the bouquet of grand old 1940s Warner Bros. noir pics colored in black and white and wartime shadows.

But it turns out those scents and shadows are what's best in "The Good German," while the story itself (the script is by Paul Attanasio, from the 2001 novel by Joseph Kanon) fades to an unmemorable gray, bleached of relevance.

On the meta level, Soderbergh has re-created not only the kind of story told in the 1940s, but the kind of technical production Hollywood gloried in more than half a century ago, too. And so the movie is best received as an erudite thesis on how function sometimes follows form and not the other way around -- how, for instance, the sound-and-picture limitations of the time (lenses and microphones, lighting and master shots) forced performances to project out rather than allow them to turn inward in today's prevailing style.

The good student will filter Attanasio's intentionally "modern"-sounding dialogue through the actors' "old-fashioned" declarations and may experience a thrill of time-and-again cinematic dislocation. The leisure-time viewer will say, "Hey, this is sort of like 'Casablanca,' so why play it again?"

EW Grade: B

'Home of the Brave'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Irwin Winkler cribs from the best in "Home of the Brave" -- unfortunately, he's copied the wrong masterpiece at the wrong time. And he's done so with a crayon. As a result, he's ended up with a Hallmark TV drama about the very antithesis of a Hallmark moment.

With William Wyler's powerful 1946 Oscar winner "The Best Years of Our Lives," about GIs returning from WWII, as a guide, the veteran "Rocky" producer-turned-director follows the bumpy progress of National Guard soldiers returning from war in Iraq to peace in Spokane, Washington. Having survived a devastating ambush in the last days of their tour, when others in their unit did not, the vets come home to a blithe American dailiness now infuriatingly alien to them.

Among them, a tough surgeon (Samuel L. Jackson) buries sadness with liquor. An athletic single mother (Jessica Biel) rages at her permanent physical wounds. A gentle guy tormented by back pain and haunted by his participation in the bloodshed (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) rapidly unravels.

The movie's aims are compassionate and respectful -- noble, even, in the desire to pack as much info (about amputees, about vet support groups) into the unsubtle, expository script by Mark Friedman. But evenness of political keel, combined with a generic filmmaking style, is an artistic weapon way too puny for a successful assault on so tough, bruising, and crucial a subject.

EW Grade: C

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