Happyness Is A Warm Gun

People say that the destination is not satisfying, it's the journey that takes you there. In The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith, this cannot be further from the truth. The film explores a short period in this man's life who struggles to become a stockbroker in order to support his family: his nagging wife and his 5 year old son. I hesitated to watch this film even though I's always heard good things about the film and how it was a tear jerker but I guess I wasn't always in the mood to watch this movie, until one day I watched it along with my grandma and mom (luckily there's no nudity in this movie, so I was comfortable to watch it with them).
In this true story, Will Smith is a very determined salesman. He's invested in these bone density computers which are very, very bulky and heavy and according to that time they were revolutionary but also very hard to sell. He juggles every potential customer who are primarily doctors with an uncanning determination and drive which is hard to see and it's heart breaking.
Along with that pressure, he needs to also deal with a wife who's very tired of her husband and has given up any hope for her husband to find a steady job and decides to leave him and the child while she goes back to her parents or somewhere, I actually forgot where, but it's as far away as she can get from him. If that's not enough, his rent has been past due for several months and he must run (it seems he's always running from someone) to a nearby hotel with his cute boy who doesn't understand why has mommy left him and daddy and now apparently they've almost lost everything.
Meanwhile, Will keeps pursuing his dream of becoming a stockbroker but while he's training 6 months to get in the program he must work without pay and must pretend that everything is cool when it's really not cool whatsoever, living in the streets practically. There's a point in the movie where he gets evicted from his hotel room, and his boy is just desperate to go to sleep and doesn't comprehend that his daddy just can't afford the room. Will's eyes turn to rage and frustration when he must tell his son that they cannot stay there anymore and they must now look for another place to stay. It's so hard to watch father and son desperately looking for a place to stay and, when there's no other solution, Will turns to sleeping inside a metro's public bathroom with his boy in his arms, covering his ears when the maintenance crew or someone bangs on the door, trying to get them out of there. I've never seem Will Smith give such a riveting performance here that you feel guilty for everything he's putting his child through, whether is sleeping in a public restroom, or going from shelter to shelter, or living out of hotels. You suffer all his struggles as if you were the parent, trying to protect and support your child the best way that you can.
By the end of the film, you're practically exhausted and drained and (in my case) very vulnerable; so when Will finally makes it into the firm after 6 exhausting months of training that he was put through and he's holding back his tears of emotion and happiness, you just feel like hugging whoever is next to you with tears of bittersweet joy yourself. Very powerful movie and one of the rarest films that chronicles the struggle of the main character without the end result. By this time, tough, little do you care how he ended up later on after he succeeded and made it big (he later created a firm and sold it for a lot of moolah), it's all about the struggle, about the pursuit solely and maybe that's the real best story to be told.