Film

Smart People (2008)

Director: Noam Murro

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

Slamming a film for having smug, unlikable characters may reflect the viewer’s prejudices more than the filmmaking quality, but it’s difficult to avoid that charge with Smart People, a movie that takes uncommon glee in redeeming smug, unlikable characters. Lawrence Wetherhold (Quaid) is a coasting, widower professor who can’t get anyone to publish his book, who won’t put effort into his teaching and who parks crooked just for the hell of it. Vanessa (Page) is his overachieving daughter, rising star of the Young Republicans, who has a portrait of Reagan in her room and hands out pamphlets titled “Stem Cell Research—The Wrong Choice.” (“What is it like being stupid?” she asks a peer in one of her more social moments.)

Together, they’ll learn from Lawrence’s adopted brother (Haden Church) that slacking and getting high can be pleasurable; Lawrence will embark on a relationship with his doctor (Parker), who cares for him after an incident at the impound lot. It doesn’t help that Wonder Boys covered nearly identical turf, down to the Carnegie Mellon setting; worse is that every line sounds like a Sundance contrivance. What saves Smart People, at least in part, is its cast: Page and Haden Church have had their talents trumpeted during recent, election-like awards seasons, but the way Quaid sells his character’s misanthropy (Lawrence’s book proceeds from the assumption “that every theory of criticism has failed us”) is a model of dry understatement. It’s almost enough for a passing grade.