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Pursuing Happyness in San Francisco
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Willis Family - Angel Island State Park - July 5, 2009
Yesterday was a perfect day to follow my suggestion from the preceding article about the movie, “Born on the Fourth of July,” namely, to get out there and pursue some happiness! Fortunately, that’s easy to do around California’s San Francisco Bay Area.
The day’s plan was a hike and picnic, and our pilgrimage destination was Angel Island State Park. Located about a mile south of the Tiburon Peninsula, it’s a short ferry ride from The City but “worlds away” from the hustle-and-bustle cacophony of that tantalizing urban jungle. The island-park is more like Mother Nature dressed to the nines - a pleasantly plump lady singing a slow-and-sweet romantic ballad.
Used over the years for a variety of purposes including military forts and an immigration center that was known as “the Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island has hosted film shoots for two movies I’ve not seen (1999’s “The Other Sister” and 1946’s “The Well-Groomed Bride”) and one I have seen (1972’s “The Candidate” starring Robert Redford). However, the movie front and center in my mind yesterday - 2006’s biographical-drama “The Pursuit of Happyness” - was set in The City in the top-left of that family photo: the one, the only, San Francisco.
Interestingly, especially given the recent July 4th holiday, in doing research for this article I learned the reason behind the intentional misspelling in the film’s title. In a 1776 treatise on racial equality, Lemuel Haynes, a biracial man living in New England during the American Revolution, quoted Thomas Jefferson's well-known Declaration of Independence sentence but spelled the last word of the sentence with a y. It’s funny how one letter - and one wrong letter at that - can sometimes speak volumes.
The movie tells the true-life story of Chris Gardner - a man who evolves in the film from struggling salesman to single dad to homeless single dad and then, eventually, to successful stockbroker. It is a role for which Will Smith received both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Mick LaSalle opined, “The beauty of the film is its honesty. In its outlines, it's nothing like the usual success story depicted onscreen, in which, after a reasonable interval of disappointment, success arrives wrapped in a ribbon and a bow. Instead, this success story follows the pattern most common in life - it chronicles a series of soul-sickening failures and defeats, missed opportunities, sure things that didn't quite happen, all of which are accompanied by a concomitant accretion of barely perceptible victories that gradually amount to something. In other words, it all feels real.”
A couple of interesting bits of trivia about the film:
- Jaden Smith stars as Christopher, Chris Gardner's son in the movie. Jaden Smith is Will Smith's real-life son, and Christopher is actually Jaden's middle name.
- Dan Castellaneta, who provides the voice for Homer on "The Simpsons" animated television show, co-stars in the film as one of Gardner's superiors, Don Frakesh. In one scene, Frakesh asks Gardner to get him a donut, a nod to Casellaneta's Homer Simpson characterization since Homer's affection for donuts is legendary.
- The real Chris Gardner appears as the man who walks past Chris and Christopher at the end of the movie.
It’s a beautiful movie set in a beautiful city, both of which should be on everyone’s “must-see” list.
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