Posted: 04/14/2008

Smart People

(2008)

by Matt Wedge

There’s a difference between making a movie about drab, miserable people and making a movie that’s just drab and miserable. Apparently, this is a lesson that director Noam Murro and screenwriter Mark Poirier have never learned. How else to explain the rambling dud that is Smart People?

Lawrence Wetherhold (the woefully miscast Dennis Quaid, The Rookie), a bitter English Lit professor, finds his uncomfortable existence disrupted when his adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church, Sideways) shows up wanting to borrow money. Things turn worse for Lawrence when he suffers a concussion and a seizure from a fall as he tries to break into the impound lot where his car is being kept. He’s informed by the emergency room doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker, Sex and the City) that she has to report the seizure, which will result in his driver’s license being suspended for six months. Chuck sees this as an opportunity to be useful as a driver and mooch off his brother, much to the dismay of Lawrence’s uptight, Young Republican daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page, Hard Candy).

From this sitcom-worthy premise, the film meanders through several plot points and tones, none of which gel together in any kind of satisfactory or interesting manner. There is a perfunctory romance between Lawrence and the emergency room doctor that suffers from the complete lack of chemistry between Quaid and Parker. Chuck tries to bond with Vanessa in an inane subplot that gets downright creepy before it goes nowhere. There’s a bit about a book Lawrence is trying to get published that has a mildly amusing punch line before the dreary romance takes over again. The whole mess plays out like a collision of half-baked ideas that were thrown at the screen with no effort put into expanding on any of them.

This is one of those movies where you feel sorry for the cast. Quaid, a normally reliable leading man, is particularly bad. He flounders hopelessly with a pompous windbag of a character. Supposedly still grieving for his wife who died years before, he’s arrogant and detached, playing Lawrence as if he were a mixture of Kelsey Grammer and Bill Murray from Rushmore. In a way, his performance could be seen as brilliant, it’s not every actor that can be lifeless and hammy at the same time. Parker is her usual flat self, but she’s given nothing to work with. We never see her character outside of the romance plot. She’s less a character and more a plot generator. Page and Church occasionally rise above the material by finding moments of humanity, but the script and lackadaisical direction keep dragging them back down to suffer with the rest of the ensemble.

Perhaps the most insulting thing about the film is the way that it shamelessly rips off the terrific Wonder Boys. A misanthropic college professor suffering a midlife crisis? A subplot about the troubles of writing and publishing a book? A tepid romance that neither party seems completely committed to? And it’s all set in a Pittsburgh that is comprised almost entirely of old houses, college campuses and bars? These similarities hardly seem to be coincidental. If it wasn’t such a clunker, Michael Chabon might sue for story credit.

Poorly shot, choppily edited and chock full of storylines that go nowhere and characters that are nothing but a series of ridiculous quirks, this is an example of the worst kind of indie-filmmaking. If you’re smart you’ll avoid Smart People.

Matt Wedge is a writer and film critic in Chicago.

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