BOOKS AND ARTS APRIL 11, 2008
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
The title of the film Smart People seems almost a dare to critics: Can you make it through your entire review without calling the movie “stupid”? Alas, it isn’t easy. Ostensibly a seriocomic tale about coping with loss and finding a balance between ambition and decency, Smart People is, for the most part, a sour and thoughtless bore.
Carnegie-Mellon English professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is a widower who has not yet come to terms with his wife’s death several years ago. Entrenched behind an angry beard and unpersuasive paunch (seriously, it looks like he has a throw pillow tucked under there), he grouses, sneers, and belittles his way through interactions with colleagues, students, and his own family: precocious 17-year-old daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page), college-student son James (Ashton Holmes), and middle-aged adopted brother and ne’er-do-well Chuck (Thomas Haden Church).
There is of course a fine cinematic tradition of supercilious misanthropes, ranging from George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt in All About Eve to Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets. But Quaid’s Lawrence breaks the mold by displaying virtually no sign of charm, wit, or even particular intelligence. He is merely a surly and resentful lout in whose company we are invited to spend the better part of an hour and a half.
After his illegally parked car is towed, Lawrence suffers a concussion trying to climb over the fence of the impound lot; when he regains consciousness, his pretty E.R. doc, Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), tells him that, as a precautionary measure, he will not be allowed to drive a car for six months. Enter slacker brother Chuck, who offers to chauffeur Lawrence around in exchange for a bed to flop in. Ensconced chez Wetherhold, Chuck quickly becomes an agent of drowsy chaos amid the regimented anality of Lawrence and young overachiever Vanessa--a Yang to their Yin. The first time he and Vanessa hang out together, he introduces the uptight teen to the joys of cannabis; the second time, to the joys of public drunkenness. (“What is it like to be stupid?” she charmingly asks a fellow barfly.)
Lawrence, meanwhile, schemes self-importantly to become the chair of his department, to publish a combative book on critical theory, and to get Janet--who, it turns out, was once a student of his with a schoolgirl crush--to sleep with him. This she eventually does, though it’s hard to imagine why. Perhaps it was the only way she could envision to make him stop pontificating. And so the movie goes from there, unfurling the inevitable tropes about learning to be a nicer person, opening oneself to new experiences, recognizing the value of family, and so on. Where’s that Cloverfield monster when you need him?
Ellen Page does the best she can as a teen automaton who wants her Dad to stop holding onto Mom’s old clothes because if he donates them to charity they’ll get a tax write-off, “which is pretty cool.” But this pitiless caricature of Young Republicanhood is meant for broader farce, not a dreary dramedy like Smart People. As it is, it’s hard to shake the impression of Juno MacGuff offering an ironic portrait of Tracy Flick. Meanwhile, Sarah Jessica Parker, who not long ago found herself uncomfortably absorbed into a boyfriend’s liberal nightmare clan in The Family Stone, here explores a conservative counterpart which, while no less irritating, at least has fewer members.
Chuck, the lazy interloping brother, is a tired cinematic type, but it is a tired cinematic type to which Thomas Haden Church brings genuine charm and humor. Casting him in the role was the filmmakers’ wisest choice; outfitting him with an absurd gunfighter’s moustache and goatee, their second wisest. Sadly, the cramped and crabby film seems to wear him down as well, and after a drunken misunderstanding that’s taken far more seriously than it ought to be, he largely vacates the premises.
First-time screenwriter Mark Poirier and first-time director Noam Murro struggle with tone and pace. Much of the dialogue is intended to be funny, but not much of it actually is. (The two biggest laughs in the screening I attended were shots of Chuck’s bare ass as he slept.) At 95 minutes, the film has a clipped, rushed feel, as if a large amount of material was cut, particularly toward the (very abrupt) conclusion. Indeed, there’s an odd sense of stinginess thoughout: Though a single coed (Camille Mana) is repeatedly repurposed--as a student is Lawrence’s class; as James’s girlfriend; as a member of the department search committee--I’m not sure we ever even learn her first name.
But Smart People’s central shortcoming is its central character, Lawrence. Though virtually everyone in the film comments on how brilliant he is, this alleged brilliance is at no time in evidence. (Shades of Diane Keaton’s ditzy master playwright in Something’s Gotta Give.) Yes, Lawrence will occasionally correct someone else’s grammar or vocabulary, and there are a few instances when the movie plops us into the middle of a conversation for a few seconds of jargon or name dropping, in order to telegraph that Something Smart has been taking place. (Lawrence: “‘So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.’” Janet: “William Carlos Williams.” Lawrence: “He was a physician.” Janet: “I know.”) But in the entire film there’s not a single meaningful conversation or exchange of ideas, no hint of why anyone would consider Lawrence so gifted--and thus tolerate him--beyond the film’s constant assertions that he just is, okay?
The premise of Smart People is that even a complete jerk can have an attractive mind, that even a pedant may sometimes have insights to share. But the movie never grants us access to Lawrence’s mind, and wouldn’t know an insight if it was tattooed on Thomas Haden Church’s ass. Though Smart People pokes fun at Vanessa’s quest for a perfect SAT result, in the end it shares her premise that intelligence is just a test score or book contract, that knowing William Carlos Williams wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow” or that an “eft” is a juvenile newt is what constitutes being smart. And that’s just plain stupid.
Christopher Orr is a senior editor at The New Republic.
11 comments
You persuaded me as to this flick's worthlessness the instant you revealed it's no-driving-for-6-months premise. This never happens. Never. Why is it so many movies are so utterly oblivious to basic reality? I think the current generation of screenwriters, my own age and younger, lacks any frame of reference outside film and television. Other movies and tv shows ARE their reality.
- aeromonas
April 11, 2008 at 2:48am
Yep, Chris you're right on. I saw Smart People last night at an advance screening. While the location was awesome (go Carnegie Mellon!), the movie was slow, unchanging, and pedantic. Few laughs from the audience, mostly due to ass shots. It's a pity, because the topic could have really spoken to the college crowd, but alas...
- Elliot
April 11, 2008 at 10:23am
AO Scott at the Times actually seemed to like this movie. Criticfight!!! dcat
- derekcatsam
April 11, 2008 at 11:46am
I don't know what this say about us, aeromonas, but my first reaction was almost exactly the same as yours. Six months??!? That must have been quite some concussion. I suppose I'll have to add this to the "skip" pile.
- drdannyu
April 11, 2008 at 11:56am
AO Scott is a fraud
- Ardalan
April 11, 2008 at 1:25pm
C. Orr you are going to have to branch out critically or you are going to drown in the great mass of cinematic sludge. My advice stick to only really exceptional movies and next time you write let's have a few thoughts on, say, Browning's Andrea Del Sarto--immeasurably more worthwhile than Smart People.
- basman
April 11, 2008 at 8:00pm
I thought this movie was cute and enjoyable. More on that in a second. *** First, housekeeping on the six months thing: He's not taken off the road because of his injury but because he had an unexpected seizure in the course of treatment. According to the movie, such a seizure has to be reported to the DMV who takes away your driving privileges for a minimum of six months. I don't know if that's true, but it seemed plausible. *** Back to the movie: I'm surprised Chris didn't compare it to Sideways, a critics' favorite which turned me off in much the way it seems this movie turned Chris off. Both are muted dramedies (or commas) that invite you to spend time with a depressed, unsociable central character who is contrasted with an easy-going ne'er-do-well played by Thomas Hayden Church and who is moderately redeemed via realistically awkward romance and some Other Stuff. I found Dennis Quaid's character far more worth the time than Paul Giamatti's unloveable loser. Maybe it's just that I'm more patient with snobbery about literature than snobbery about wine. Maybe it's because Quaid has far stronger fundamentals beneath his bitterness. He is evidently passionate and intelligent about a worthy subject. (Wine doesn't count, especially as hackneyed metaphor. Wine is, at best, an interesting hobby, says this sheepish consumer of domestic beer.) He's doing pretty well in his profession, despite having an "unpublishable" excessively difficult and pedantic manuscript, and his prospects improve during the film. Although he makes little effort when we meet him, he's more charismatic and better looking than Giamatti's character. (None of this is a dig on Giamatti, by the way, to whom I'm a recent convert -- see John Adams.) One can easily imagine a younger, more dynamic version of Quaid's character impressing Sarah Jessica Parker in a lecture hall. (Picture Quaid in D.O.A., the not-bad remake of the noir classic where he plays an English professor who has to solve his own murder with co-ed Meg Ryan.) As for the plausibility of Parker's interest, don't underestimate the power of a young crush to overcome later deficiencies. There is a TV news anchor in Chicago named Allison Rosati who, when I was a teenager, was a gorgeous charmer and inspired in me ardent admiration. She has since had a million kids and is no longer, how shall I say, thin, but having been impressed many years ago, she can still flip that switch. Besides, Parker is not made out to be the unlikely ideal woman Virginia Madsen played in Sideways. She is frustrating and frustrated in her own way, and I bought their pairing here as well as his genuine effort to change for her. *** As for Ellen Page's Young Republican Vanessa, I did not view her as farce but as a real person -- a person I know, a person I recognize in myself even (except for the Republican bit), especially at her age, and in fact a very recognizeable "smart person." Unhappiness and intelligence, they say, are correlated, and Vanessa demonstrates, with some poignance, why that can be: an inability to connect with people, a facility for masking insecurity with superiority. If you're relatively smart, it's common to feel like an outsider and to resent that status because it seems like undeserved punishment. After all, aren't smarts good? When Vanessa -- drunk -- says to a townie in the bar, "What's it like to be stupid?," the response is, "What's it like to eat lunch alone?" Answer: "It sucks." The problem in a nutshell. *** I understand Chris's criticism that the "smart people" don't show their smarts except in superficial ways -- vocabulary, grammar, Scrabble, test scores, fancy cultural literacy, and so on. I regard it as an especially valid point because I imagine that people who are good at things like crossword puzzles think themselves really smart, and, speaking as someone who is not good at things like crossword puzzles, I know that that sort of proficiency is a poor indicator of a sharp intellect generally. Still, the movie isn't about these characters' insights or intellectual substance. We are led to believe, convincingly enough I thought, that they are in fact smart beyond superficial indicators. There are pervasive understandings of "smart" as meaning, on the one hand, knowledge or, on the other hand, experience-based savvy, neither of which really describe the intellectual bent of "smart people." I'm sensitive to that, and I noticed it in the movie, but that issue didn't bother me. The movie is about the people, not their smarts, and I connected with them without having to know what exactly Quaid's character's manuscript said or understand the objectivist philosophical underpinnings of Vanessa's conservatism.
- jhildner
April 12, 2008 at 2:49am
In our hyper-intelligent society, one must be reminded that a movie is not to be taken literally. It is an attempt to capture a reflection of the times we live in. I haven't seen it but the idea of a doctor finding a professor attractive as a return to a nostalgia to college life is attractive. Juno was also criticized for being conservative about abortion. One must try to see the subtext of a movie to find a ground to appreciate it, especially a comedy. A comedy is based on easing a social tension to promote a catharsis, a way of finding a way of promoting social or cultural transition. In a way the less memorable a movie, Juno was to me, the deeper its meaning penetrates so that a successful movie is one that creates an amnesia. This may explain how some people can proclaim a dislike for a movie they haven't seen, a fear of accepting that social change exists in spite of our existence. Juno was conservative in that it spoke to a feminism that emphasized the importance of life being promulgated. We live in a time where even this basic fact needs to be emphasized, so far have we fallen in the world of post-modern and free market capitalist self-interest. It is a form of reeducation taking place and this movie may be the man's answer to Juno, though it is only a guess. Elaine Page is the latest cultural icon that connects the dots. In our time of pornographic self-hate and anarchic social trends, it is sad we need to build our hopes on a young actress for salvation.
- Ian Zwerling
April 12, 2008 at 3:58am
First, I would like to thank you, Mr. Orr, for your insightful and engaging contributions to the blogosphere. At the beginning of this comment I find it pertinent to state that I saw Smart People on the day of its release and with a genuine excitement for the film, but also knowing very little about it (or more accurately having a misconception about the film from seeing its trailer compared to seeing the actual film). You made some very astute observations about the film however, after reading your review, I was left wondering what your thoughts are about the importance of the film's message (or attempted message) and how that correlates to the film's overall quality. You label the film a "seriocomic tale about coping with loss and finding a balance between ambition and decency," after which you go into detail about the characters and plot of the film with very little mention of its message (for lack of a better word). What do you feel is the significance of the message of a film? Is it possible for the film (any film) to be high-quality based solely on the strengths of the message? And, finally, do you feel that Smart People, even with its shortcomings, conveyed the message that it intended to convey? In the last paragraph of your review you write, "The premise of Smart People is that even a complete jerk can have an attractive mind, that even a pedant may sometimes have insights to share. But the movie never grants us access to Lawrence's mind." You back this up by your examples of how his intelligence is never exhibited, though often commented on. It could be said that even with no examples of Lawrence's intelligence the messages of "coping with loss and finding a balance between ambition and decency" are still met. Your claims are well reasoned but I could not help but think that the discrediting of the characters does not inherently discredit the film as a whole. I would love to hear what you have to say about this and hope to hear from you.
- JBS
April 14, 2008 at 7:28am
"Repurposed"???--Call me stupid, but what on earth might that mean, in this context, in any context--"Recasted" I quite understand. But I can't presume that's what Mr Orr meant. Enlighten me, Christopher. The unabridged OED isn't any help.
- Daniel
April 16, 2008 at 12:43pm
Repurpose is a word that has been pretty common for I would say about 20 years which means what you would think -- put to a new purpose -- and it appears in American Heritage and Merriam-Webster online. The OED is not a dictionary of American English, though I'm surprised it's not in there.
- jhildner
April 16, 2008 at 3:40pm