 "Photo: Special to The Daily Gamecock")
2 out of 5 stars
For a film that explores the balance between the social norms of fun and happiness and "cerebral fun," "Smart People" provides neither, particularly not the latter.
With half-baked, disjointed plot lines and no overriding theme or purpose, it is no wonder that Miramax's latest film, written by Mark Poirier and directed by Noam Murro, did not receive positive feedback when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.
The events of the movie revolve around widower Lawrence Wetherhold, a crotchety curmudgeon of a Carnegie Melon professor, played by Dennis Quaid. Wetherhold and his uptight, overachieving, intellectual snob of a seventeen-year-old daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page), are in a miserable, self-pitying rut when his deadbeat adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) arrives to beg for handouts.
Enter love interest: Sarah Jessica Parker playing a doctor and former student with the residual effects of an unrequited schoolgirl crush on Professor Wetherhold. Add in a brooding college freshman son with resentment, and you have all the human interaction Lawrence Wetherhold can handle.
With an all-star cast, it is amazing how flat and empty this movie comes off. Quaid is not convincing at all as a grieving husband and seems to provide no depth or motive for his mean-spirited and asinine disregard for the people around him.
It is nice to see Parker a little more laid back for once, but she still brings an awkwardness to her character's dealings with men, which is uncomfortable and unrelatable. The relationship between the two characters is so contrived, implausible and lacking in any real emotion or even attraction that it is difficult to differentiate which is more repulsive: the couple or watching Dennis Quaid boorishly eat Sarah Jessica Parker's face.
Other relationships fail to resemble reality as well. The should-be foil pair of Uncle Chuck and Vanessa makes no sense. Chuck tries to loosen up the driven teen's android ways with pot and alcohol, to which she gives surprisingly little protest despite her Ronald Reagan-loving conservative ways.
Add a little near-incest drunken kissing and discussions of the tax write-off potential of the deceased mother's clothing, and the connection seems nearly worthless for the overall effect of the movie.
Despite that, Ellen Page is still the only believable character. Coming off the success of "Juno," Page proves that she can do a very different type of high school student. The portrayal of the classic bitter motherless daughter who holds tight to her pride does not leave a caricature-like impression the way the other characters do.
In the spirit of honesty, the dull topical writing, based on Alice Munro's short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," does not give the actors a lot to work with. In a tale that aims to explore the unique individuals' self-realizations and interconnections in an ensemble situation similar to recent cinematic successes "Little Miss Sunshine" and "The Family Stone," "Smart People" lacks the "twinkle of humanity" which Chuck claims to see in his brother by the end of the film.
Based on the tagline "Sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn," nearly everyone involved in this pointless, banal waste of 95 minutes must actually boast high IQs, because they have a lot to learn about filmmaking.
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