Christopher Gardner's Life

A man enters a young boys’ bedroom. It appears to be either late at night or early in the morning. The man turns on a bedside lamp illuminating a clock that shows 5:30 a.m. He says “time to wake up, man.” This man is Christopher Gardner, an eager salesman, trying to overcome trials and hardships of his life in the early 1980’s. Gardner, who misguidedly sinks his entire life savings into what he believes is the future of medicine, loses his wife and home. Based in San Francisco, Gardner, who also has a young son to care for, looks for shelters or housing whenever possible often arriving too late or being unable to find available spacing and having to spend nights in public restrooms. After acquiring a competitive unpaid internship at a reputable …show more content…
As a matter of fact, many of the most memorable scenes from the film were either fabricated or grossly exaggerated. For example, the movie blames Gardner wasting his life savings on a large amount of portable bone density scanning units on his eventual homelessness, while in actuality, it was a result of the low pay he received while training for Dean Witter. Given that the devices were such a huge part of the movie, I feel the movie lacks quite a bit of realism. Notwithstanding, it does add an element of originality. Still, a couple of vital scenes revolve around the scanners that were written into the movie. One, for example being, when one of the scanners is picked up by a homeless man who in his fragile mind state, believed the machine to be a time machine. Will Smith, playing Gardner, lost the scanner after the doors shut it out after he ran to catch the subway to get away from a cabbie after not being able to pay his fare. Later Gardner spots the homeless man, in a pretty dramatic scene runs to retrieve it. Also, in another instance, Gardner leaves a scanner in the care of a woman playing music on the street whom he spots again and proceeds to chase her on the streets. In another key scene, Gardner impresses a Dean Witter executive by completing a Rubik’s cube while accompanying him on a cab ride. In the film, this led to him getting the interview for the Dean Witter training program, while in real life, Chris Gardner did make friends with a Stock Broker for the company. And one more key element added to the film just for “dramatic effect is the idea that only one person from that training program would be hired. When empirically, anyone who finished the program and passed the thereafter licensing exam where given a job. One reason this is a big deal is that in the film, it’s a competitive internship (Media).