Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/19/08
I start every review by pulling
the credits off the Internet Movie Database. I try not to read any
other reviews including user reviews on websites before putting my own
thoughts down, but I usually catch the headline of the most recent IMDB
user comment. In this case, I had to chuckle because it's hard to
imagine the indie-fried Dennis Quaid comedy Smart People described
in two words any better than “Foofalow” has: “It's OK”. Seemingly
infected by the same malaise that hangs over its' characters, Smart
People is never less than watchable, but ultimately comes off as the
cinematic equivalent of clinical depression. It's hard enough for
this movie to even get out of bed in the morning: don't expect it
to do much once it has.
Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis
Quaid) knows as much about literature as anybody: just don't expect
the pompous Professor to bother passing that knowledge along to his students.
In a tailspin over the death of his wife that's gone on so long it's become
a lifestyle choice, he's raised two utterly miserable children. Son
James (Ashton Holmes) bitterly rebels against everything he stands for
while daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) embraces his hard-working elitist misery
and eats lunch by herself every day. Pulling a stupid stunt to retrieve
his briefcase from an impounded car, Lawrence slips while climbing a fence
and suffers a seizure. His Doctor is Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica
Parker): to say her time as his student is long-forgotten suggests
he ever noticed her in the first place. She informs him that the
law requires his license to be suspended for six months due to the seizure.
He needs a driver, and conveniently his deadbeat adopted brother Chuck
(Thomas Hayden Church) has shown up in town looking for money. Chuck
moves in and immediately makes loosening Vanessa up his project.
Meanwhile, Lawrence and Janet begin a tentative relationship complicated
by the fact that his social skills have atrophied almost beyond repair.
When things break down between them and Vanessa mistakes Chuck's friendship
for love, it's going to be a very chilly winter in Pittsburgh.
Smart People starts
with some very good characters, well-played by a first-rate cast.
Lawrence could pretty much talk for the rest of his life without ever stopping
to hear what anyone else had to say, and Quaid nails that certain presumption
of intellectual superiority upon which Universities all over America are
built. Chuck remains a slacker at a far more advanced age than society
permits, and fits Church's wry stillness like a glove. Page is also
perfectly cast to type as yet another kid who thinks she's smarter than
everyone around her. Parker and Holmes do their best with characters
a little more off the rack: the woman who doesn't know what she wants
and the angry indie teen.
The fatal flaw with the work
of both debuting screenwriter Mark Poirier and first-time director Noam
Murro is that they allow the characters' tentative fear of the people (and
world) around them to infect their storytelling, resulting in a film mostly
about people in different rooms refusing to even talk about the fact that
they should not only be in the same room, but should be talking about THAT
THING which, you know, they're not even gonna bring up. And this
is no Remains of the Day: the hesitance of Lawrence and Janet
and Chuck and Vanessa to talk their problems through is a plot contrivance,
not the point of the story. Smart People has no more than
45 minutes worth of actual plot, and it's forced to stretch and stretch
and stretch until it gets to the 90 minute mark. Even then, the movie
is so glum that its' happy endings don't feel all that happy. There
are some laughs, and an interesting subplot about a book Lawrence is trying
to publish and the compromises he has to make to allow that to happen.
Too bad that at precisely the moment when that subplot seems to have really
caught fire, the movie drops it.
Smart People is the
kind of movie that's mostly for fans of its' stars: it won't bug
you too much if you have to watch it, but unless you have reason to make
yourself hang on its' every lethargic incident, you're unlikely to get
all that excited about it either. Like the man said, it's... OK. |
