Review

Review Date: 13-April-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Smart People (2008)

Smart People squeaks by with a "Just OK" like a sophomore scrapes a C- in a graduate seminar. It is slightly endearing and probably well intentioned, so one would feel cruel dismissing it as "Junk." But it is not insightful or sparkling or well spoken. It is an amalgam of stale observations tailored to both mallgoers and the art house crowd.

Proof of the movie's drabness can be found in the fact that it renders its star, Dennis Quaid, almost completely unattractive. As a Pittsburgh professor, Quaid is meant to be one of those rumpled, socially inept eggheads who can relate to Dickens more than his children and whose intelligence offers enough excuse to draw certain people of a masochistic, or possibly motherly, bent. (His wife having died, his ineptness runs rampant.) The actor looks great in a beard, but the character eschews all his spark. He is bogged down by stereotypical quirks and effects (disgruntled students, hostile colleagues, publishing woes, academic ambition, and … an old Saab? C'mon) and is not allowed to emerge as an individual as opposed to a symbol of someone who needs to be saved from himself.

The candidates for his salvation are unfortunately just as flat, even though they are also played by actors not lacking for charm. One of the professor's former students (Sarah Jessica Parker), now a doctor, responds to his gruff advances apparently due to a lingering crush and a dismal romantic history. Ellen Page, hot off her Juno acclaim, applies her trademark coolness to the role of Quaid's teenage daughter, who masks a motherless confusion by pairing her father's intellectual arrogance with the grim efficiency of a Nazi. She is almost too odious for sympathy (again, because we mostly see her exterior), yet a couple of scenes manage to communicate her youth and pain. These involve her uncle (Thomas Haden Church), the black sheep who was adopted into the family and provides the movie's comic relief.

The uncle, of course, represents the wise-in-life-if-not-wise-in-textbook counterpoint to all the literati running around. (There is a collegiate son in the mix too, but he is embarrassingly superfluous.) The theme expressed in this contrast and in the title is the stalest aspect of the film. I for one am weary of Hollywood arguing that the cure for the personal problems of bright, responsible people is getting high and behaving stupidly. True, other movies have made this point more stridently, but screenwriter Mark Poirier also seems to believe that the notion of scholars being as screwed-up as everybody else is original or comforting enough to drive the story. Smart People beckons to one and all: those who pride themselves on a high IQ can rest assured that being lost (and found) happens to their lot; others who suspect they have average brainpower can enjoy knowing that the smarty pants do not have all the answers. Fine and dandy, but while such messages are being communicated, little of real depth is being said.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.