Good material gone wrong

This little movie's main point isn't very enlightening: that "smart people," in the sense of self-absorbed intellectual types, may have a good deal to learn about life. Carnegie-Mellon Eng. Lit. prof Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) and his ambitious Young Republican daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page), "smart people" both, are isolated and morose, clueless, snobbish, and rude. Along comes an accident that prevents Lawrence from driving and at the same time provides him with two people who shake him up. One is the ER doctor who treats him, Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Perker), a former student who still nourishes a small flame for him. The other is Wetherhold's ne'er-do-well but quite happy adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Hayden Church), once again out of dough, who moves in and stays as Lawrence's interim driver. Even son James (Ashton Holmes), already a student at Carnegie-Mellon, gives Lawrence and Vanessa a push, by example, since his life includes sex and poetry. He's often seen with girlfriends and sells a poem to The New Yorker.

Wetherhold himself has a manuscript to sell, a grumpy tirade about literary criticism nobody wants. Quaid's character may begin to recall Paul Giamatti's in Sideways (which also featured Church) a film that resembles this one but is more successful. Wetherhold's MS. has the pompous and boring title The Price of Postmodernism: Epistomology, Hermeneutics and the Literary Canon. Vanessa suggests changing it to You Can't Read, and that works: Penguin takes a closer look and decides that with radical editing the book's provocations can be turned into fodder for NPR and Charlie Rose.

The novelist and short-story writer Mark Poirier wrote the screenplay. He grew up in academic settings but, alas, still manages to depict classroom moments in a routine simplistic manner hardly even justified by this prof's exaggeratedly condescending attitude toward his students. It's difficult to believe a class on Victorian poetry at a place as good as Carnegie-Mellon could be this elementary. Lawrence's emotional dryness and general withering up--underlined by a clumsy walk and pot belly, scruffy beard and hair--is at the center of a wry, even brutal picture of personal dysfunction. Poirier offers little in the way of emotional content or resolution. The movie's value is in little moments and some of the acting, especially Church's. The "smart" characters aren't witty. Page uses the same brisk delivery as in her admired performance in Juno. But coming from an irritating android who models herself on her father's snobbism, the manner only makes her seem shallow and unappealing. Lawrence and Vanessa are still isolated and stuck some years after the death of her mother and his wife, which they have yet to let go of. Chuck and Janet of course have help to offer with that. Janet will go on some dates with Lawrence. These turn out badly, because he's such a self-centered creep, but both keep trying. Chuck tries to give the wife's clothes to the Goodwill, a symbolic gesture Lawrence eventually accepts on his own initiative. Chuck and Vanessa also have a flirtatious and awkward "friendship." Though its point is a little hard to discern, it's apparently meant to help bring Vanessa out of her shell.

Smart People is made watchable by decent acting and some moments of specificity. But it has serious problems. To begin with Quaid's character is so firmly established as an utter, boorish prig in the first scenes (especially toward students at his school, but toward everyone else too) that it's hard ever to care about him thereafter. Quaid's readings are uneven from scene to scene, sometimes hard-edged Jack Nicolson knockoffs; sometimes helpless and weary; finally and abruptly, chirpy and human. Page is annoying too, and pathetic. There is nothing to her character but smug preening; the actress' shtick doesn't work as well in this earlier performance. Parker is sullen and shut down--not much of a "there" there--though she does manage to come across, with limited material, as a more or less decent person.

Only Church is really likable; he's also the only one who's "smart" in any real sense, possessing what in modern jargon is called "emotional intelligence." He claims to be happy; but he admits he is a failure with women and "should be gay"--so something isn't too happy there, either, but at least he has the self-awareness Lawrence comes to belatedly, and a bit too contritely. For a more complex and subtle kind of shut-down intellectual type, see the Leonard Schiller character played by Frank Langella in Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening. For a better drawn intellectual snob, see Jeff Daniels' character in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale.

Smart People's screenplay unfolds in a desultory manner, its scenes constantly cut short without wit or rhythm, and interrupted by pointlessly over-obtrusive acoustic pop songs. If this is a story about intellectual types, why are there nothing but sound bites, instead of real conversation? All these are failures of craft by Munro and Poirier that detract from what might have worked better and hopefully gone somewhere. Worst of all one feels the filmmakers don't care about their protagonist enough even to satirize him.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.