Smart People

It's hard to conceal it when a movie has a sitcom-y feel to it, even when the screenplay boasts college-level vocabulary words. We're to assume that the film's title is meant to describe our on-screen characters, yet while watching Smart People, it's difficult not to get the feeling that the title actually refers to the false impression that these filmmakers clearly have of themselves. A good word to describe Smart People is "inconsequential"; for all it boasts, it provides little to no insight on anything, and it is as thinly-plotted as movies can get. For a TRULY FANTASTIC film that covers very similar ground to this, and has some of the most awesomely quirky characters and hilariously caustic lines, look no further than 2005's The Squid and the Whale.

The part of Smart People that feels MOST like a sitcom is, unfortunately, the one that takes up the most screen time, and that is the romance between the widower Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) and a former student of his, Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker). This storyline is plagued by almost every cliche in the book, with contrived twists of events and even with Janet discovering eventually that she got pregnant from the very first time that she slept with Lawrence.

We get what definitely has the potential to be a more interesting storyline with the character of Lawrence's daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page), a senior in high school, and a deliciously cold and smug member of the Young Republicans who cares about nothing but academic success (her own, and her father's as well), and is therefore friendless and internally miserable. Page's assured and sharp performance gives the viewer every reasonable hope of thinking this will prove to be a worthy subplot to follow. Sadly, the "smart" filmmakers get in the way of this, most notably at the end of the film. Suddenly, the movie bombards us with loads of lines (by several characters) that are meant to explain why Vanessa acts the way she does and what she needs to do in order to reach a change. This is when I felt most insulted. ANY viewer (even a kid with a short attention span) who watches this film will not have a hard time at all understanding Vanessa's personality and how she needs to shift her priorities to be happier. But the filmmakers insist on throwing in condescendingly explanatory lines, and this is when it becomes MOST obvious that they really do think the film's title describes them, while perhaps surmising that we are below them in terms of our level of intelligence, thus leading them to think it necessary to do so much explaining, especially towards the END of the film, which, if anything, is supposed to be the point at which we already have a solid idea of who our characters are. It's a shame, too, because (bad as this will make me sound) I can actually relate on some levels to the character of Vanessa, and it would've been a pleasure to watch Page's performance unfold and reveal everything we need to know about Vanessa (as it does), but without the unnecessary and even offensive clarifications from the script.

The other unfortunate thing about this film is that it gives a thankless role to Ashton Holmes as Lawrence's other son and Vanessa's older brother, James, who is already in college and resides in a dorm. I have absolutely no clue why this character wasn't fleshed out as three-dimensionally as the other characters. He is obviously an important component of the family of three, and although he doesn't live at home with Lawrence and Vanessa anymore, he does have a fair enough amount of screen time that would've given the movie space to develop James into something interesting. This is most painful towards the end, when we learn that a poem he wrote was published and that he refuses to show it to his father. It makes us wish we had gotten more insight on him earlier in the film, so that we could understand why he feels the way he does about his father, or why he bickers so much with his sister during Christmas dinner. Instead, all we really get in terms of James is a lame can't-even-call-it-a-subplot in which Vanessa and uncle Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) discover him hooking up with someone in a bar. The reason why it's not even a subplot is because it ends up amounting to nothing.

One of the things that most bothered me is that, at the beginning, we're provided with the information that Lawrence's wife (and thus, James and Vanessa's mother) passed away (which is, of course, a great way to set up a drama to have characters we can get emotionally invested in), and it SEEMS we're meant to assume that the reason why these characters behave so bitterly has to do with their having lost their loved one, yet there's very little in the film that highlights that. In fact, there's very little that suggests that Lawrence and Vanessa were any different before she passed away. We learn through Janet that Lawrence was the same type of professor when she was a student of his over a decade ago, and there is also a line from James that indicates that Vanessa was just as self-absorbed in her mental prowess when she was nine years old. Were it not for a moment towards the end of the film in which Vanessa says she went to see her mother's grave, some may have even forgotten about the dead mother throughout the film, as the emotional impact of her absence isn't as deeply palpable as it should be.

To be entirely fair, despite all of these missteps, Smart People is never boring. I mentioned that it is sitcom-y, and indeed it is, and so, it is a diversion in the same sense that you'd enjoy an episode of a decent show, and quickly forgot about it after it was over (one thing I'll admit is that I'm VERY glad that I waited for the DVD on this one, because there's no question that it's the kind of movie that'll be more enjoyable on the smaller screen, much like this year's earlier Charlie Bartlett). There certainly are some amusing moments, and I also appreciated the ironic turn things take, much to Lawrence's dismay, when he meets with the folks who want to publish his book. Still, there's an inevitable sense of disappointment when a movie that I know I could've absolutely loved comes off as such a pretentiously patronizing work of cinema. Anyone can borrow a few conventions from Indie Movies 101 and use a dictionary to throw sophisticated vocabulary into the mix, in order to make the whole thing seem like edgy and innovative filmmaking. I hate to say it, lest it make ME sound like the pretentious one, but these people aren't all that smart.

5/10