The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical drama film directed by Gabriele Muccino and starring Will Smith as Chris Gardner, a homeless salesman.

The film was released on December 15, 2006, by Columbia Pictures, and received positive reviews, with Smith's performance and the emotional weight of the story garnering acclaim.

[3] In 1981, San Francisco salesman Chris Gardner invests his entire life savings in portable bone-density scanners, which he demonstrates to doctors and pitches as a handy improvement over standard X-rays.

While he can sell most of them, the time lag between the sales and his growing financial demands enrages his wife, Linda, who works as a hotel maid.

While Chris tries to sell one of the scanners, he meets Jay Twistle, a lead manager and partner for Dean Witter Reynolds and impresses him by solving a Rubik's Cube during a taxi ride.

After Jay leaves, Chris skips out on paying the fare, causing the driver to angrily chase him into a BART station, forcing him onto a train just as it departs.

However, Chris’s financial problems worsen when his already diminished bank account is garnished by the IRS for unpaid income taxes, and his landlord finally evicts him and Christopher.

Regardless of his challenges, Chris never reveals his lowly circumstances to his colleagues, even going so far as to lend one of his supervisors, Mr. Frohm, the last five dollars in his wallet for cab fare.

In order to create dramatic impact, the film artistically altered Gardner's life story by compressing several years' worth of events into a shorter period of time.

"When I talk about alcoholism in the household, domestic violence, child abuse, illiteracy, and all of those issues—those are universal issues; those are not just confined to ZIP codes," he said.

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.

"[12] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film "a fairy tale in realist drag ... the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw ...

To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness ... How you respond to this man's moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith's and his son's performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams.

"[13] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of a possible four stars and commented, "Smith is on the march toward Oscar ... [His] role needs gravity, smarts, charm, humor and a soul that's not synthetic.

"[14] In Variety, Brian Lowry said the film "is more inspirational than creatively inspired—imbued with the kind of uplifting, afterschool-special qualities that can trigger a major toothache ... Smith's heartfelt performance is easy to admire.

Neither Conrad's script nor Muccino's redundant direction shows [what] lifted the real-life Chris above better educated and more experienced candidates, but it comes through in the earnest performances of the two Smiths.

Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity wrote, "this film provides the perfect antidote to Wall Street and other Hollywood diatribes depicting the world of finance as filled with nothing but greed.