Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
No
Reason to Live
(Smart People, 6/2/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Having
spent some time in academia, this critic can attest that—on the
average—the people in it are about as fulfilled as folks in other
professions. Yet you'd never know it based on portrayals of academics
in recent movies. From Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Savages
to Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale to Steve Carell in
Little Miss Sunshine, professors on film lead lives of thwarted
ambition, indifferent or contemptuous of their students and peers, doomed
to coast along that long, sad, downward slope to a lonely death. Or
as Randy Newman put it in a song, "smart people have no reason
to live."
It's tempting to put this down to
the free-floating anti-intellectualism that's become as American as
NASCAR and fried baloney. More charitably, it might have to do with
a vague conviction that too much education—like too much power
or too much beauty—can only lead to a bad end. Whatever it is,
it shows no sign of going away, now that Noam Murro's Smart People
is in town.
The jerk-with-tenure this time is
Carnegie Mellon professor of literature Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis
Quaid). Honing obnoxiousness to the level of a fine art, Wetherhold
is a pompous, dyspeptic windbag, as oblivious to the needs of his students
as he is disdainful of his colleagues. Aiding and abetting his self-absorption
is his 17 year-old daughter Vanessa (Ellen Juno Page), a 17-
year old who has taken on the domestic role—and perhaps the self-importance—of
her dead mother. When Wetherhold suffers a seizure in a dispute over
on-campus parking (sounds unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility
at Cornell), he's forced to give up his driver's license. This gives
his ne'r-do-well brother, Chuck (Thomas Hayden Church), the opportunity
to invade the professor's home as his temporary chauffeur.
With its dysfunctional family, and
its explicit affirmation of the transformational power of love, Smart
People is not exactly fresh material. As soon as we lay eyes on
Quaid's rumpled curmudgeon we seem destined to witness his fitful rebirth
as a non-schmuck. Beyond its obvious themes, the film seems cast from
characters of other hit films—Church plays more or less the same
lout he did in Sideways , and Page is pretty much Juno again,
only this time in her senior year of high school. If it had Laura Linney
instead of Sarah Jessica Parker as Wetherhold's pretty doctor/ex-student,
Murro's movie might as well have been an art-house answer to those omnibus
spoofs of Hollywood epics (Epic Movie, Date Movie) that show
up at the multiplexes. (Parker, for her part, isn't exactly Carrie Bradshaw
here. But her shoes do look better than most seen around the ER.)
What makes Smart People pleasant
to watch is screenwriter Mark Poirier's dialog, which manages to crackle
without slipping into Diablo Cody cutesiness. Much as the characters
seem recycled, Poirier sets them in plausible collision, with witty
results. I'll also admit one guilty pleasure: I kind of want
to see Church's lout from Sideways in another movie. It wouldn't
be bad to spend another couple of hours with Juno, either. To any who
agree—here's your chance.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog