A Shameless Bust

Did you know that Will Smith’s 2006 dysorthographic blockbuster “The Pursuit of Happyness”—‘inspired’ as it was by the “true story” of homeless man turned stockbroker Christopher Gardner—was a fraud? To all the many who walked out of the theater heartened by the triumph of hard work and perseverance, please become uninspired. You’ve been deceived.

First of all, Gardner never touched a Rubik’s Cube in rise to the top floors of the Dean Witter brokerage firm, yet Smith’s character is found repeatedly whipping through that Technicolor obstacle course of cognition. Why? Well, plot development—Gardner needs to have his ‘prodigy’ moment, of course—and because Will Smith likes Rubik’s Cubes. Furthermore, Gardner’s son—five in the film—was only a toddler when he was chasing the office job:no existential questions or heartbreaking dialogue in the real thing, only gurgling.

Of course, Mr. Gardner still made his unexpected climb from something resembling the very bottom of American society to the top. Whether or not some details were airbrushed or accentuated when rendering his story for the screen seems (and seemed to audiences) immaterial.

Compare the public silence about inaccuracies in Smith’s film with the dull roar surrounding the recent release of “21”, based on Ben Mezrich’s (already not-quite-true) account of MIT’s card-counting Blackjack Team. Based on the trailer alone, one can tell the production team knows well mainstream America’s unflagging yen for aesthetically pleasing Caucasians cavorting in shiny cities and beating all odds (Ocean’s 11 through 16, would you stand up please?).

The problem is that the team mainstay wasn’t emo-haired Brit Jim Sturgess but Chinese-American mechanical engineering major Jeff Ma—less airbrushing than racial revisionist history. For his part, Ma has no problem with the casting, asserting that he understands that only Chinese superstars like Jackie Chan or Chow Yun-Fat can draw the mainstream audiences studios seek.

In the same breath, Ma might have said to hell with the Asian-American blogs and MIT alumni who wanted to see the charming imperfections of the “true story,” not its glossy but vacuous approximation. Where Ma was an Exeter graduate with big-money ambitions, the film’s “Ben Campbell” is a mathematical genius with a poor widowed mother, desperate to make it to our very own medical school.

Luckily, as success arrives, so does the lap-dancing affection of Jill, Ben’s once-unattainable crush played by starlet Kate Bosworth. Little by little, it becomes clear that the film’s alterations were, as Ma admitted, less concerned with working out narrative kinks and more intent on sanding inconvenient, unusual reality down to the blanched, manicured trifle that cinemagoers demonstrably know and love.

Sony Pictures, the production company behind “21”, took a Clintonian tone of indignation when addressing charges of box-office bias. Didn’t the two attractive Asians on the poster mean anything to them? Look how attractive and Asian they are!

While the inclusion of these supporting characters might deflect allegations of racism, they do little to address the real problem here: “21” is a very stupid movie. It should have lived up to the expectations of people who actually care about Mezrich’s book, its characters and meaning. Alas, critics hated it, the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans found it ‘pathetic’ and many MIT affiliates and involved personalities seem to have disowned it—precisely because the real human element was mortgaged and forgotten in favor of that mass-appeal treatment: a pearly film of sexual tension, quick cuts and a plot both sluggish and oversimplified.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that (like “The Pursuit of Happyness”) American audiences loved 21. The film scored a relative victory at the box office, pulling in $24 million on its opening weekend. Presently, its U.S. gross climbs beyond twice that. Whether the film would have done as well embracing the idiosyncrasies of its real-life prototype, we won’t ever know—though, given the trend toward quirky American filmmaking, it might have been worth a shot.

At any rate, a trial-tested formula seems to have been proven once again—thanks a million, Scream. For now, only an advisory note: actually learning to count cards will prove far more rewarding than indulging Hollywood’s proclivity to value audiences over authenticity, and ticket sales over true-to-life adaptations.

James M. Larkin ’10, a Crimson associate editorial, is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House.