Moral and Theme in “The Pursuit of Happiness” Movie

The theme explored in the movie is homelessness. But there is also a moral to the story. It enforces the theme that with determination, courage, positivism, and hard work, it is possible for an individual to succeed and come up in life from the lowest state of homelessness and poverty.

Homelessness is a social problem that affects poor people. The police are forced to respond to this issue of homelessness, but there are no policies for the police to effectively tackle this social issue. Local governments frequently harbor hostility towards homeless individuals and develop local laws that affect them adversely. Law restricting zoning, where one can sleep, anti-loitering and anti-begging ordinances, and unequal enforcement of the law are not common. A homeless lifestyle promotes risk for every aspect of a child’s life. Contributing factors to homelessness are poverty, unemployment, and racism. History says that systemic changes that happened in society during the late 1970s and early 1980s allowed “many people to fall through the social safety net and end up living and dying in our streets.”

The issue of homelessness is aggravated when many politicians, government officials, community agencies, corporate interests, and journalists choose to perceive the homeless people as the main contributing factor in the issue of homelessness and see them as losers, addicts, crazy, lazy, misfits. This assumption has lead to negative public stereotypes of homeless people. The entire homeless population is stereotyped in the public mind as being slothful, too lazy to work, criminal in nature, too drugged, or too mentally defective to be employable. The movie reinforces such negative stereotypes of homeless people. A wispy-haired homeless man is shown running around carrying Chris’ stolen bone density scanner, believing it a time machine back to the 60s, reinforcing the stereotype that all homeless people are mentally ill.