Film review: Smart People

Published on Friday 9 May 2008 18:06

SMART PEOPLE (15)

Director: Noam Murro

Running time: 95 minutes

***

LAWRENCE Wetherhold is a sad-case English professor who's been in emotional hibernation since his wife died a decade ago. His students hate him because he is heartless and condescending and makes them wear ID tags because he can't remember their names, and he also pays little attention to his prickly college-student son, James (Ashton Holmes), and overachieving Young Republican daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page).

Who could play such a curmudgeon? Michael Douglas? Sir Anthony Hopkins? Somehow Dennis Quaid doesn't seem a natural answer to the question. Still, there's a frisson to be had watching Quaid – who was running around single-handedly saving the president in Vantage Point only a couple of months ago – going all disagreeable, strapping on a misshapen corduroy jacket, a beard and a fake pot belly and emoting like John Houseman. He won't clear out his dead wife's wardrobe, but his clogged-up bedroom is far less of a problem than his abrasive personality, which he wields like a Taser against anyone who comes into contact with him. Even his family Christmas dinner is a cheerless affair, with snide asides and a passive-aggressive overloading of the dinner plates. "I never tire of Bleak House," he announces, in a comic moment that is not so much dark as grey.

Discombobulation finally arrives when he suffers a head trauma while retrieving his impounded car, and lands in the care of Dr Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former student of his, whose earlier crush on him is re-ignited. Parker is also in working schlub mufti for her role, although her physician treats casualty patients with hair artfully arranged like the Medusa of ER. And much as we want to see the relationship work out, it's hard to see why anyone other than a student of embarrassment would give the professor a second chance after their disastrous first date.

Another consequence of his head injury is that Wetherhold is forbidden to drive, so he reluctantly hires the chauffeuring services of his broke brother (Thomas Haden Church). Uncle Chuck likes to smoke pot, watch Spanish-language soap operas and often forgets to bolt up the trapdoor on his long johns.

He also dispenses romantic advice for free, urging Wetherhold to take the doctor on a date by reasoning: "You spend $50 on dinner, that's grounds for intercourse." Every time he enters a scene, the film perks up, although the fact that he's Dennis's adopted brother still makes a subplot where his niece develops a crush on him a) creepy and b) only slightly more likely than Lindsay Lohan developing a crush on Paul Giamatti.

Vanessa is a friendless brainiac, but even when high and drunk she must know there are other romantic options in a town the size of Pittsburgh. Even more worrying, Page seems to be giving us her deadpan, sarcastic Juno performance all over again.

Smart People is firmly in the tradition of dark comedies about emotionally remote writers – The Squid And The Whale, Wonder Boys and The Accidental Tourist – but the idea that even the brightest of us have to learn something new every day and that even geniuses need to connect gets lost in the film's contrived plotting.

Adding to the hanging cloud of misery is an irritating guitar-based soundtrack that seems to been inserted in the hope that it can do some heavy emotional lifting, but really just makes the film sound as if it was shot during a hanging at a folk festival. This movie may be quietly intelligent, fairly amusing and certainly clinically depressed, but it misses being very smart about people by a mile.

• On general release