Sunday, August 3, 2008

Smart People


This one comes from the producer of "Sideways" and stars Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, and Thomas Hayden Church. How can you go wrong?

Well, Mark Jude Poirer hadn't written the screenplay for a full-length feature before this, and Noam Murro hadn't directed one. Together, they tried to make a smart movie about "Smart People," but ended up giving us a main character who seems "Lost in Translation" and supporting characters that never seem to interact as significantly as we want. The lines are smart, some of the scenes are smart, and Poirer and Murro certainly show promise. But for a film about intelligent people, there isn't much in the way of logic or believable motivation for what they say and do. It's as if Poirer tried to throw in an offbeat element here and an oddball element there, thinking it would do the trick. But smart writing and a collage of eccentricity is not the same thing as a viable narrative structure. While Poirer creates characters with traits that you believe, there's not enough energy here. The most we get comes from a taboo-breaker between a "bad" uncle and his 17-year-old Young Republican niece, and even then the plug seems to have been pulled too quickly before anything really interesting could have happened.

You don't have to look any further than the films this one will remind you of to make mental comparisons and pinpoint the problems. Dennis Quaid plays a self-absorbed English professor (why is it always English???) who is so into his own book on "The Price of Postmodernism blah-blah-blah" that he doesn't know (or particularly care about) his students, doesn't like or respect his colleagues, doesn't know much about his two college-aged children (Ellen Page and Ashton Holmes), hates his brother (Thomas Hayden Church) whom he insists on describing with the adjective "adopted," and treats anyone he comes in contact with as if they were inferior. We're to believe that this guy wants to be department chair, yet he hasn't cared enough about the department to attend meetings for the past several years. And he's anti-social. Why would he want to be an administrator? He's been teaching for so long that he's somehow grown into a mantle of entitlement, but so many publishers have passed on his life's work that he's destined to become "dead wood" in a few short years. We're led to believe that what's partly to blame is the loss of his wife, whose clothing he insists on keeping in the closet, though it's been years since her death.

"Wonder Boys" did a much better job of dealing with a has-been professor with a life's work that's gathering cobwebs and a former student who's ready to jump in bed with him. Coincidentally, that film was also set in Pittsburgh. Here, Quaid plays Prof. Lawrence Wetherhold, who can remember everything about Victorian novels but can't recall the names of students who have taken several classes with him. Into his life comes erstwhile brother Chuck, who has a history of looking to his overly serious brother for money. But his timing is perfect this trip. The professor, who arrogantly parks across two spaces, gets his car towed and another former student won't let him in the impound lot to fetch it. While climbing over the fence to get it himself, the professor takes a tumble and ends up in the emergency room where another former student is the attending physician. And another doctor is whispering to her in the hallway some snide remark about the professor not remembering her. Uh, excuse me, but the guy just came in with a head trauma, and she would have been his student like ten years ago! It's during moments like these where Poirer really belabors the point and defies logic in the process. It's hard, too, to fathom how or why Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker) goes from distain to dis guy's for me, or why she fakes an emergency call to get away from him when we're still trying to figure out why she wanted to be with him. Curious stuff, and none of it's convincing. And what is it about former students everywhere? Isn't Pittsburgh a big place?

Anyway, the timing is right for Chuck, because his brother's head trauma triggered a seizure, and he can't drive for six months and needs a chauffeur. You'd think that more would develop from that situation, but it doesn't. Instead, Chuck tries to bond with young Vanessa (Page, who's not nearly as perky here as she was in "Juno"). And bonding for a black sheep means getting the underage girl to smoke pot with him and taking her to a bar and buying a pitcher to share with her, then making a trip to Goodwill together. When you outline the narrative arc for any of the characters you begin to see how undernourished the plot and subplots are. The boy who's in college is off-camera for so many scenes that we even forget he's a student at the same university where his father teaches. So Unc hangs out with his niece, the son does his thing off-camera, and the main plot involves the professor's attempts to get back into the dating game with his doctor. Unfortunately, we saw more "opposites attract" energy from Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in "Something's Gotta Give" than we do here. None of the situations or plotlines seem to go far enough, and with performances that also seem restrained, you walk away from this film thinking that it had the potential to be much more interesting and witty than it was. And the really clever moments just make you realize there aren't enough of them to go around.

This one comes from the producer of "Sideways" and stars Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, and Thomas Hayden Church. How can you go wrong?

Well, Mark Jude Poirer hadn't written the screenplay for a full-length feature before this, and Noam Murro hadn't directed one. Together, they tried to make a smart movie about "Smart People," but ended up giving us a main character who seems "Lost in Translation" and supporting characters that never seem to interact as significantly as we want. The lines are smart, some of the scenes are smart, and Poirer and Murro certainly show promise. But for a film about intelligent people, there isn't much in the way of logic or believable motivation for what they say and do. It's as if Poirer tried to throw in an offbeat element here and an oddball element there, thinking it would do the trick. But smart writing and a collage of eccentricity is not the same thing as a viable narrative structure. While Poirer creates characters with traits that you believe, there's not enough energy here. The most we get comes from a taboo-breaker between a "bad" uncle and his 17-year-old Young Republican niece, and even then the plug seems to have been pulled too quickly before anything really interesting could have happened.

You don't have to look any further than the films this one will remind you of to make mental comparisons and pinpoint the problems. Dennis Quaid plays a self-absorbed English professor (why is it always English???) who is so into his own book on "The Price of Postmodernism blah-blah-blah" that he doesn't know (or particularly care about) his students, doesn't like or respect his colleagues, doesn't know much about his two college-aged children (Ellen Page and Ashton Holmes), hates his brother (Thomas Hayden Church) whom he insists on describing with the adjective "adopted," and treats anyone he comes in contact with as if they were inferior. We're to believe that this guy wants to be department chair, yet he hasn't cared enough about the department to attend meetings for the past several years. And he's anti-social. Why would he want to be an administrator? He's been teaching for so long that he's somehow grown into a mantle of entitlement, but so many publishers have passed on his life's work that he's destined to become "dead wood" in a few short years. We're led to believe that what's partly to blame is the loss of his wife, whose clothing he insists on keeping in the closet, though it's been years since her death.

"Wonder Boys" did a much better job of dealing with a has-been professor with a life's work that's gathering cobwebs and a former student who's ready to jump in bed with him. Coincidentally, that film was also set in Pittsburgh. Here, Quaid plays Prof. Lawrence Wetherhold, who can remember everything about Victorian novels but can't recall the names of students who have taken several classes with him. Into his life comes erstwhile brother Chuck, who has a history of looking to his overly serious brother for money. But his timing is perfect this trip. The professor, who arrogantly parks across two spaces, gets his car towed and another former student won't let him in the impound lot to fetch it. While climbing over the fence to get it himself, the professor takes a tumble and ends up in the emergency room where another former student is the attending physician. And another doctor is whispering to her in the hallway some snide remark about the professor not remembering her. Uh, excuse me, but the guy just came in with a head trauma, and she would have been his student like ten years ago! It's during moments like these where Poirer really belabors the point and defies logic in the process. It's hard, too, to fathom how or why Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker) goes from distain to dis guy's for me, or why she fakes an emergency call to get away from him when we're still trying to figure out why she wanted to be with him. Curious stuff, and none of it's convincing. And what is it about former students everywhere? Isn't Pittsburgh a big place?

Anyway, the timing is right for Chuck, because his brother's head trauma triggered a seizure, and he can't drive for six months and needs a chauffeur. You'd think that more would develop from that situation, but it doesn't. Instead, Chuck tries to bond with young Vanessa (Page, who's not nearly as perky here as she was in "Juno"). And bonding for a black sheep means getting the underage girl to smoke pot with him and taking her to a bar and buying a pitcher to share with her, then making a trip to Goodwill together. When you outline the narrative arc for any of the characters you begin to see how undernourished the plot and subplots are. The boy who's in college is off-camera for so many scenes that we even forget he's a student at the same university where his father teaches. So Unc hangs out with his niece, the son does his thing off-camera, and the main plot involves the professor's attempts to get back into the dating game with his doctor. Unfortunately, we saw more "opposites attract" energy from Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in "Something's Gotta Give" than we do here. None of the situations or plotlines seem to go far enough, and with performances that also seem restrained, you walk away from this film thinking that it had the potential to be much more interesting and witty than it was. And the really clever moments just make you realize there aren't enough of them to go around.

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