This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/movies by /u/Aggressive-Bowl5196 on 2025-01-17 06:28:02+00:00.

I grew up thinking the wife in Pursuit of Happiness was a bitch but as an adult, I completely understand her.

The movie tells us at the very beginning they were doing decently enough as a middle class/working class family until Chris invested their entire life savings into a portable bone-density scanner. A medical device whose concept and price tag would have been immediately bullshit to any sensible person. A man as intelligent as the movie sells Chris to be, would have to be extremely arrogant in order to pursue it.

Imagine you have a small child and your husband throws everything away on a delusional business idea. That alone alone would be justifiable enough for a divorce but to make matters worse, he refused to count his losses and get a real job to help support their family. She worked countless hours and seemed to do the brunt of the child care while he wasted all day and night trying to sell those machines. When he gives her last minute calls to tell her she’ll have to pick up their son, he is almost sociopathic in his annoyance when she complains about how it effects her job or that she won’t have any break. When she is finally at her wits end from the stress and desperation of their situation, he tells her that he wants to take a low paying internship to be a stockbroker. His wife and child were a breath away from starving on the streets while he jumps from one outlandish dream to the next. She was right to cut her losses at the moment.

Her only failure was not fighting harder to keep custody of their son since she seemed to have slightly better financial stability and job security. She should not have let Christ guilt and bully her into believing their son was better off with him. Chris loved his son but a person who would selfishly allow their child to be homeless on the street so he could keep a low paying internship instead of getting a decent paying job has no right to keep custody of that child. Chris could have still been an active parent by visiting him instead of forcing his son to live that way.

The only reason why it’s heartwarming is because he got the job in the end instead of he and his son being shanked one random night while living in public bathrooms. The reward doesn’t justify the risk he took with his son’s safety just so he could be a father.