As I read the book, it reminded me of two movies. One movie
was called The Pursuit of Happyness. It
premiered in late 2006, and featured Will Smith and his son Jaden. Will Smith
plays Chris Gardener, who after investing his entire life savings his portable
bone-density scanners, ended up homeless. His wife was unable to deal with
their new lifestyle. She decided that it was best for their son, who was about
five at the time, to stay with his father while she relocated to New York. A
very similar situation occurs in The Road
as well. The boy’s mother did not want to deal with living in a
post-apocalyptic world. She decided that killing herself was the solution and
that it was the father’s responsibility to care for the boy. Both mothers took
the easy way out, which I found interesting. Even though only one of them died,
they both were in a sense dead to the child they left behind. Neither child had
contact his mother. So for Christopher, even though his mother was alive, she
was dead to him because he never really knew her son. Another similarity is how
we see the survival of both the father and the son is dependent upon each
other. A number of times, in both The
Road and in The Pursuit of Happyness
both fathers had moments when they felt as if they couldn’t bear their
circumstances any longer. It was their sons that held them together and kept
them going.
No comments:
Post a Comment