Review: SMART PEOPLE

When you have three actors as charming and likable as Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, and Thomas Haden Church, you can coast for a long time simply on the goodwill generated by the strength of their personalities. That's exactly what Smart People does before running out of gas. The film opens wide in the US on Friday after debuting at Sundance earlier this year.

Smart People goes after easy targets early and often, generating an above average amount of laughter without ever providing much illumination about its characters. Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a glum English Professor who bores his students and can't get his latest book published. He teaches poetry at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, though it could just as well be Anytown, U.S.A. for all the sense of place that is imparted.

Written by Mark Poirier and directed by Noam Murro, the film is maddening in the lack of color and details in other aspects as well: when the family sits down to Christmas dinner, I was initially puzzled because there's no indication that it's winter in Pittsburgh. My father was raised in Pittsburgh, and if there's one thing I know about the city, it's the freezing cold temperatures and abundance of snow. Though references are made to the season, along the lines of "it's chilly outside, a sweater would be nice," we're never made to feel the cold.

It may sound like I'm picking at a little thing, but I think it's symptomatic of why Smart People doesn't hold together upon any kind of examination. Yes, it made me laugh; no, it did not insult my intelligence. But that's not really enough, is it? Maybe if you just want an easy laugh, it will suffice, but if you dig a little deeper, it comes up empty.

Here's more of what I'm talking about: Lawrence Wetherhold lost his wife, but we don't know how long it's been since she died. (If it was mentioned, it was a throwaway line of dialogue, and I didn't catch it.) We assume it's not that long a period of time because his 17-year-old daughter, Vanessa, is greatly disturbed when he starts dating again, but we don't really know. We don't have to know specifically why she died, though that bit of information might be helpful in understanding Lawrence and Vanessa. Was it a long, wasting illness? Was it a quick, unexpected accidental death? Was it suicide?

Vanessa, as played by the delightful Ellen Page, talks much like the wisecracking title character of Juno, only without the pop culture references and without the magnetic personality. She shares her father's mordant sense of humor and deadpan dislike of most people, as well as his general inability to get along with the opposite sex. Oddly enough, she starts to fall for her Uncle Chuck after he moves into their house, and ...

Eeew, gross! Did I just say that a 17-year-old falls for her Uncle Chuck? I know, it's supposed to make you upchuck or otherwise throw things at the screen in disgust, I suppose, but in the skewed pysche of the movie, it's acceptable because Uncle Chuck is not her father's real brother -- he was adopted!

Yes, still pretty strange, and the only thing that salvaged it for me was that Thomas Haden Church plays Uncle Chuck, and he immediately sets her right after she kisses him, and ...

Oh, forget it. I'm trying to be fair to this movie and it's hopeless. It's the kind of movie that I enjoyed well enough while I was watching it -- and laughing along with the audience -- but as soon as I started thinking about it, all kinds of things started bothering me.

Let's take the central romance between Professor Wetherhold and Doctor Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker in a particularly thankless role). They meet cute in a hospital emergency room after the Professor hits his head on the pavement in an awkward fall from a fence. (He was illicitly retrieving his briefcase from his car, which had been towed and impounded after he parked it illegally.) She informs him that he has suffered a trauma-induced seizure and head injuries, which incurs an automatic six-month suspension for his driver's license. He doesn't remember that she was a former student of his, but he invites her to dinner after she gives him a ride home from his neurologist appointment. At dinner, he bores her silly, so she calls him a pompous windbag and abruptly abandons him at the restaurant. Later he apologizes, they try again, he doesn't talk as much, and she instantly takes him to bed.

If the Professor didn't look like Dennis Quaid -- even a Dennis Quaid with a funny walk, uncomfortable body language, and a phony distended belly -- there's no way that Doctor Hartigan would go out with him. He's not funny, he's very stiff, and he's still boring! (The movie's idea of intelligence is the accumulation of facts rather than insights, evidently.) Yet suddenly she is swept away, carried on a tide of romance, apparently for no reason. That might be acceptable if she escaped into his arms to ease the stress she felt from her duties as an emergency room doctor, but we never get that sense. Is she bored, is she settling, is she anxious to have children, is she insane? We never know.

Beyond the narrative requirements contrived to get the romance started, the problem of the Professor's medical condition is abandoned. He has one appointment with a neurologist, says he feels better, and that's it. Isn't a seizure a serious matter? Isn't it something to worry about? Is it something that runs in the family? Maybe in the overall scheme of medical matters, it's a minor affliction. We never know.

Why is Uncle Chuck considered a perpetual loser? He has a good sense of humor, people seem to like him, he's considerate of others, he tries to do the right thing, he doesn't really care about material possessions. What's wrong with him? Why doesn't his brother, the Professor, like him? We never know.

Why doesn't the Professor get along with his son? (And why does the son get to bang the hot lady English professor?) Why doesn't the Professor ever really talk to his daughter? Is he just an insensitive jerk? Has he always been this way? Was he a jerk with his wife? Is he still feeling guilty because he realizes too late that he was a jerk to his wife? We never know.

Smart People might better be titled Wisecracking People Who Veer Between Being Pleasant and Verging On Insufferable, but that probably wouldn't fit on a theater marquee.