Smart People

May 16 2008 The Journal

(1hr 35mins) Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, Sarah Jessica Parker. Director: Noam Murro

INTELLIGENCE is a poor substitute for common sense and good manners.

That’s certainly the case in Smart People, a pithy coming of middle age story about a university professor who can wax lyrical about the poems of William Carlos Williams, but is incapable of saying ‘I love you’.

Novelist Mark Poirier, who makes his screenwriting debut, traverses familiar territory to The Savages, Sideways and The Squid And The Whale.

He enforces the idea that intelligent people are prone to the same acts of gross stupidity and insensitivity as the rest of us – they just say the wrong thing with elan.

Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), a self-obsessed authority on Victorian literature, is consistently rude to his students at Carnegie Mellon University, doling out meagre grades for their hard work. He has little time for excuses, and even less time for his estranged son James, who is more concerned with his girlfriend than academic excellence.

The only person to impact on Lawrence’s life, even tangentially, is his teenage daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page), an overachiever moulding herself in her old man’s image.

Humdrum routine is thrown into disarray when the professor’s pot-smoking adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Hayden Church) turns up uninvited and installs himself in the spare room.

Soon, the slacker sibling is offering Lawrence tips on dating a former student, ER doctor Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), and fending off the amorous advances of Vanessa.

The film has a wry one-liner for every crisis, but the characters are sometimes too glib and their reactions too cute to be credible.

Quaid is surprisingly endearing as an emotionally stunted widower.

Page’s wise-beyond-her-years teen bears striking similarities to her signature role in Juno, minus any of the self-deprecating charm or vulnerability, while Church’s fun-loving layabout conjures fonder memories of his Oscar-nominated turn in Sideways.

Overall, this is enjoyable without being brilliant.