Movie Log: Smart People

Smart People is yet another thoughtful, small movie about a family with problems -- you can each supply two or three other examples of the form.

If I remember right, it sat on the shelf for a while between filming and release, and it does feel a bit lopsided. (I have a sneaking suspicion that it was edited in the wake of Juno and in preparation for Sex and the City by making it focus more on the characters played by Ellen Page and Sarah Jessica Parker.)

Dennis Quaid is Lawrence Wetherhold, a complete asshole of an English professor at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh; he's completely stopped trying to connect with his students or even remember their names some years back. He's the center of the movie, but he's also a complete prick, and that's a problem. Yes, he is a widower, but his assholishness isn't obviously related to the loss of his wife -- which seems to be several years in the past -- and it doesn't feel like anything temporary.

Smart People seems like it's going to be about a six-month period in Lawrence's life; at the beginning of the movie, he ends up in the hospital after a fall and concussion, and is told that he won't be able to drive for six months. So he'll be seeing a lot more of his ne'er-do-well (adopted) brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), and possibly of the head doctor of the ER, Janet (Parker), who was his student at least ten years before.

But Chuck's scenes are mostly with Lawrence's uptight high school senior daughter Vanessa (Page), whom he first tries to teach to lighten up, and then runs away from.

Lawrence does begin a halting, sputtering romance with Dr. Janet, which is difficult to take seriously. Lawrence is a shaggy mess physically, always shuffling around, and I've already mentioned how unattractive he is as a person. It's exceptionally difficult to see what Janet finds attractive about him -- and she's in the position of running back to him several times. Their romance is one of the hardest things to swallow in Smart People.

Chuck and Vanessa's relationship is similarly odd, though Vanessa does confront Chuck about that -- which makes it odd within the movie, and thus acceptable.

Lawrence also has an older son, James (Ashton Holmes), who doesn't get much screen time. James is dating a young woman, Missy (Camille Mana), who is also in at least one of Lawrence's classes and is the student representative on the committee searching for the new head of the department (which Lawrence heads). I suspect at least a couple of scenes of these characters were cut out of the movie; it looks like they should have been more important than they are. (James, in particular, is a cipher; he scowls at his father and squabbles with his sister but hardly anything else.)

Smart People is one of those movies where every scene is at least decent, and all of the acting is well above par, but either the script or the editing failed to bring everything into focus. It's worth seeing if you like this kind of movie, but it's not more than middling for the category.