I do okay.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m just sort of chugging along these days. I’m not exactly raking it in hand over fist, but I’m not hurting most days. Every now and then, it gets exciting as we move some money around and try to figure out if we can do everything we need to do. I credit my wife with being excellent at things I am not, including budgeting and punctuality, and it’s been a long time since I had that sinking feeling.

But... I have had it. Plenty of times. When I moved to LA, I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t have an in anywhere. I got the one job I knew I could get based on my education (I dropped out of college) and my work experience (a whole lot of theaters and video stores), managing a theater. And I got an apartment that I could just barely afford. And I split the bills with my writing partner, and even so, we just barely scraped by. And since then, I’ve had the sort of ups and downs that aren’t uncommon for anyone working around the film industry. And I say around because it was almost five years before I could honestly say I was working in the film industry.

And those were some lean years. Plain and simple. I suffered because I believed that things could get better. And there were a lot of times where I just plain couldn’t cover my bills, when things got away from me, and I got familiar with that sinking feeling.

Like I said. It’s been a while. And I hope I never feel it again, especially now that I’ve got the responsibility of a son and the possibility of a larger family beyond that. I think I’ve got enough things lined up and enough possible things lined up that I can keep moving forward, keep building up some stability. And maybe there will come a time when I will feel like I have got enough.

I’m certainly not there yet. I’m a long way from there. But still... I do okay.

And so I can identify with Chris Gardner, the real-life figure who is played by Will Smith in Columbia’s big-budget Oscar-bait release this weekend. And I can honestly say that watching his free-fall from stability into homelessness was one of the most harrowing things I've seen in a theater all year.

It would be easy to play Gardner for cheap sympathy all the way through, but I think real credit is due to screenwriter Steve Conrad (THE WEATHER MAN), whose work here is subtle and precise, and also to director Gabriele Muccino, who resists any sort of overt tearjerking until the film’s final stretch, when it’s almost welcome as a release after the unbearable tension the film builds in places.

It’s sort of nightmarish as Gardner struggles like a modern-day Job, obviously loving his son and obviously struggling to make an honest living and just live a simple, decent life. No matter what Chris does, it seems like life is determined to kick him in the balls. Hard. Just so it can laugh at him. And Chris, raised without a father, has one goal in his heart above anything else... he wants to be a father to his son. He wants to set an example. He wants to be what he never had, what he always dreamed of. There’s more going on in Will Smith’s performance than the easy charm he automatically brings to each movie. Every now and then, you see an iconic movie star dig a little deeper, and this is one of those moments for Will. You can tell that he means it. Part of that is because he’s playing his scenes with his real-life son Jaden Pinkett-Smith, who proves to be a naturally gifted performer in his own right, and the scenes they play together open Will up in a way that you can’t fake. When you and your child communicate, just the two of you, there’s nothing else like it, nothing more intimate.

There’s a scene in the film that just tore me up, the moment that you could probably call rock bottom. Gardner’s scared because he knows that he’s got to protect his son from what’s happening, but he doesn’t know how. And he makes this leap... engaging his son in a game of make-believe that goes from being fun to being self-preservation... that is so beautiful and so powerful and so desperate all at once.

It’s not a perfect film, in part because we don’t really see Chris at work. We see that Chris wants to work, we see Chris go in to work. We see Chris being pushed around by his boss (Dan Castellaneta) at work. But we don’t really get to see the skills that make Chris special, the skills that pull him up out of what seems to be an impossible situation. I think that would have been where Will Smith would really shine, and it’s not in the film.

But there’s a quiet integrity to the movie. It never really milks its moments. Instead, it makes its points and keeps moving forward, the way Chris Gardner does. The one thing the film absolutely gets right about him as a character (and of course I can’t begin to say how much of this is true) is the way he refuses to be beaten. He doesn’t grandstand about it. He simply perseveres. He keeps moving. If someone steals from him, he recovers, and if the opportunity to fix things presents itself, he’s ready to act, to do whatever he has to. He has dignity about it, though, because he knows that what he does will affect who his son becomes, and he’s determined to protect that as long as he can. There are moments where Chris loses his cool, but just fleeting brief moments. He always ends up coming back to focus on the problem at hand.

The supporting cast is filled with people doing strong work in small parts, including Thandie Newton, Brian Howe, James Karen, and especially Kurt Fuller, who finally gets to play a character who isn’t a bag of shit, something he seems to relish. Phedon Papamichael’s photography is studio-slick but with a raw indie/foreign quality that makes this feel more like life and less like a movie. Don’t get me wrong... you pretty much know what you’re going to get based on the poster and the trailer. Hell, the trailers give away too many of the film’s big moments, so if I have a complaint, it’s that I felt like I saw too much of this prior to seeing it.

I’m sure I’m a cheap mark for this film in general these days, but even so, I found myself impressed by this for the most part, and I’d definitely recommend checking it out this holiday season.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles