Focus Assignment

The Ultimate Underdog: Chris Gardner

“I’m going to kill this motherf*cker.” These are not exactly words that people think might come out of Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith), the amiable and innocuous salesman from the blockbuster hit, “The Pursuit of Happyness.” From watching this movie, society believes that he is the paradigm of the perfect citizen—diligent, tenacious, and industrious. However, the representation of Gardner’s adverse life that Hollywood has so glamorously tampered with, is far from the inconvenient truth; the movie fails to portray the destructive tendencies that he fostered at one point in his life. In times when he was blind to the public eye, Chris Gardner formulated violent plans involving murder, knives, and even lethal poisons.

Abandoned by his father at an early age, Chris Gardner wandered through life without the presence of a real father figure. Instead, he had Freddie, his stepfather, who was “[his] enemy from the second [he] laid eyes on him” (28). He was a man of malicious intentions who seemed to take pleasure in inflicting misery, and his favourite method of tormenting Gardner was by snarling, “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Due to exposure to an irresponsible and dangerous guardian, Chris inevitably began to develop a violent streak of his own.

On one Sunday afternoon, when Chris was only eight years old, the landlord of their apartment was furious with his mother due to her inability to pay rent, so in a response to his shouting, he fetched a butcher knife from the kitchen and shouted, “You can’t talk to my momma like that!” (40). Over time, Chris began to cultivate an inclination for violence, due to the bad example set by Freddie, and eventually, there came a time when Chris devoted his time to concocting plans for killing Freddie himself—“I wanted him gone from my life, but how could I do it?” (51). At long last, he conspired a foolproof plan: to invent a lethal potion that his stepfather was going to mistake for alcohol. However, due to his childish ignorance, his plan failed miserably, but Chris’ desire to rid himself of Freddie’s antagonistic presence was never fully staunched. Regardless of his good intentions (not only freeing himself from his stepfather’s grasps, but preventing him from further abusing his mother and sisters), Chris Gardner clearly possessed a dark evil, which was blind to the public eye simply because of his penurious standard of living.

When we think about Will Smith from the movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” the initial images that come to mind are not those of bloodshed and murder, but rather, of perseverance and overcoming obstacles. But, public perceptions are not always the best source of information, as they are more often than not superficial, bias, and heavily distorted. However, regardless of Chris Gardner’s history with violence, he is still a saviour of the broken and the impoverished, for epitomizing what it takes to claim the American Dream, and for demonstrating that the “impossible is now simply possible” (296).