When the trailer for this new pseudo-indie flick from Disney-owned Miramax debuted around Sundance time I noted that by being named “Smart People” the film is automatically marked as a movie for people who aren’t “smart.” Think about it like this: If “Planet of the Apes” were made for the dirty ape demographic, wouldn’t it just be called “Planet?”

The way it is, the movie seems to put “smart people” on display as if they are a zoo attraction. Look at the self-absorbed college professor do the New York Times crossword puzzle in his stuffy, book-lined natural habitat. In our next exhibit, we have his over-achieving, neo-con daughter wearing sweater vests and brushing up on her vocabulary in preparation for achieving a perfect score on the SATs.

A bearded, pot-bellied Dennis Quaid plays narcissistic professor Lawrence Wetherhold. He ignores his students, moves the clock forward in his office to avoid honoring office hours and only seems interested in getting his newest book published. The book, a scathing criticism of the entire history of literature criticism, seems like a book only someone like his daughter might enjoy.

Portrayed with a sufficiently stuck-up, affected, self-important pomp by “Juno” star Ellen Page, Vanessa Wetherhold is the kind of girl who prefers academia to pop-culture and wouldn’t know a party if it was raging in her living room.

When her loser of an uncle, Chuck, played by Thomas Haden Church, sporting an especially loser-like mustache, sneaks her into a bar in an attempt to loosen her up, she ends up drunkenly asking a couple of girls in line for the bathroom, “What’s it like to be stupid?” They astutely reply “What’s it like to sit alone at lunch?”

“Smart People” attempts to be about intelligence and how that gets in the way of relationships. Dennis Quaid lands in the hospital after a botched break-in to the campus impound lot (he’s so self-absorbed he can’t help but park in two spaces at a time). His sexy young doctor reports his impact-induced seizure to the DMV, meaning Wetherhold won’t be able to legally drive for six months.

The role was originally intended for the adorable Rachel Weisz but instead was given to Unsexiest Woman Alive Sarah Jessica Parker. Personally, I have no problems with Parker’s sex-appeal-it’s her one-note acting that offends me. As it turns out, that doctor is a former student who harbored a crush for her Victorian Lit 101 professor and actually lets the obnoxious snob take her out on a date. She’ll have to drive, of course.

For all his other driving needs, Lawrence turns to Chuck, his adopted brother. Chuck moves into the spare room upstairs and immediately starts spreading his smoky, mellow wisdom around a household desperately in need of an enema powerful enough to kill the bugs up everybody’s butts. As Chuck, Church gets all the best lines and generates almost every laugh the movie has to offer. His one-liners are frequent and ingratiating but offer little more than obvious color commentary on the Wetherhold’s sad life style.

I watched “Smart People” with two other Wash. U. students who would fit the descriptor offered by the title. They disliked it much more strongly than I. They pointed out that first-time director Noam Murro obsessively dropped in “intelligence” markers, such as high-scoring games of Scrabble and discussions of William Carlos William’s place in literature as an imagist and a modernist, which added nothing to the plot and simply reminded us that the people we were watching are, indeed, smart. I forgave him this because I think the movie is not intended for the “cultured” indie audience, but for less pretentious and, quite frankly, larger crowds. “Smart People” could be seen as “The Squid and the Whale” for philistines, but marking it as such would be undervaluing the message of both movies.

This is not to say that “Smart People” is a resounding success, or really successful at all. It has some funny moments unconnected to the plot, but has far too may hanging threads and unintriguing characters. I don’t believe that it should be derided for presenting “faux intelligence,” (although it does deserve a black mark for lazy storytelling and characterization) because I think these characters were not supposed to be realistic. Just as Hilary Swank’s boorish relatives in “Million Dollar Baby” were cartoonish representations of low-brow middle-America, the Wetherhold clan are just easily digestible portraits of the academic elite.

This movie’s problems are far simpler and more fundamental. If Hollywood (and don’t let the markers fool you, this movie is as studio as it gets) really wants audiences to enjoy a movie, they should make characters that are at least mildly interesting after they are easily identified. Lawrence comes off as needlessly grumpy at the start and, while Quaid plays it well, the character doesn’t ever open up enough to let us see him as much more than a grouch. In a movie like “Sideways,” which “Smart People” certainly tries to emulate, Paul Giamatti’s character Miles shows his unflinching humanity when he steals money from his mother’s sock drawer. It’s a bold move for the filmmaker, and one that may lose the audience, but a divisive choice is better than none at all. “Smart People” doesn’t ever take any chances and, for a movie that wants so badly to be clever, that’s a pretty dumb decision.

Popularity: unranked [?]

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.