Film of the week: Smart People

THE creators of Smart People gathered together some of the best actors in Hollywood - and then wasted their time with a tedious sham of a movie...

SMART PEOPLE ( 15) *

DIRECTED BY: NOAM MURRO
STARRING: DENNIS QUAID, SARAH JESSICA PARKER, ELLEN PAGE, THOMAS HADEN CHURCH

CONSIDER that title for a second: Smart People. It's supposed to be ironic, buts it's more than a little smug. Immediately championing itself as an intelligent and sophisticated film for intelligent and sophisticated audiences, it's a wonder the marketing department didn't just call it "Come and see this if you liked Sideways, Juno or Wonder Boys".

Granted, that wouldn't be very subtle, but nor is Smart People, since the "smart people" who saw those aforementioned movies are exactly the viewers its title has been designed to entice. Too bad it also writes a cheque that this tediously plotted, desperately contrived and resolutely middlebrow movie cannot cash. It's not that Smart People – starring Dennis Quaid as a widowed college professor whose dysfunctional family life is thrown for a loop when romance unexpectedly enters the frame in the form of Sarah Jessica Parker's ER doctor – is a bad film.

It's that it's an awful one, its sheer hideousness amplified tenfold by the self-satisfied way it flings around literary references, discussions about the precise use of language and banal, overly polished witticisms about life and love in the most obvious way imaginable. Watching it unfold is like being confronted by one of those jumped up morons from Dragon's Den who have deluded themselves into believing they've cracked the genetic code for happiness when all they've really done is come up with something useless, like a glove for a door knob.

Don't believe me? Here's the earth-shattering theme at the heart of the movie: bookish, intelligent people are – wait for it – not always so smart when it comes to matters of heart. That's it. That's all there is to "get".

That's the profound, truth essaying concept that's supposed to have eggheads everywhere swooning with delight. It's doesn't exactly take a high IQ to grasp does it? Indeed, the fact that the film's tag line also spells it out in bold letters ("sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn") hints at its true audience: pseudo intellectuals. In other words: this is a smart movie for dumb people.

Unforgivably, it's also a film that wastes a very strong and appealing cast with weak story-telling that barely gives anybody enough material to propel them into the next scene, let alone through to the end of the movie. Quaid is the most ill served here. Hidden beneath a mop of greasy hair and a bushy beard that's become movie shorthand for "professorial", there's no mystery to his teacher, Lawrence Wetherhold, an arrogant, curmudgeonly, occasionally infirm seeming grouch who hates himself and his job.

It's clear from the outset that grief over his wife's death has intensified his pompous, arrogant ways and turned him into a bitter misanthrope who can't be bothered to learn the names of his students or even make an effort to remember their faces. This grief has also turned him into a pretty poor father. His son (with whom the film barely spends any time) harbours vaguely defined feelings of resentment towards him and he's allowed his strait laced daughter, Vanessa, to take over the role of dutiful wife and mother by letting her run the household, flatter his vanity and fight in his corner instead of encouraging her to enjoy the remainder of her childhood.

Played by Ellen Page with the same kind of snarky, wise beyond her years surliness that made her such a joy in Juno, Smart People somehow manages to drain the life out of her in a way that suddenly makes the actress seem far too old to be playing high school students. Or maybe that's just because she's been asked to play a Young Republican who idolises Dick Cheney and has a photo of Ronald Reagan above her bed.

Such character quirks are doubtless intended to be satirical, but it's a measure of how artistically conservative the film is that it never comes across this way. Such conservativeness extends to the patchy, toothless way it attempts to add some edge to proceedings by having Vanessa form an oddly sexualised bond with her father's adoptive brother, Chuck ( Thomas Haden Church). It feels thoroughly out of place, coming out of nowhere and heading in pretty much exactly the same direction. Chuck, a gauche, fun loving layabout, arrives on the scene after Lawrence has an unexplained seizure resulting in a six month driving ban. Broke, Chuck offers to become his brother's chauffeur and moves into their house.

The film provides no particular reason for his presence and Chuck and Lawrence's sibling relationship is barely explored. It's as if he's on hand purely because someone thought the film needed a wise-cracking salt-of-the-earth type to enliven proceedings. Parker, whose character, Dr Janet Hartigan, enters Lawrence's life when she treats him for his seizure, is used similarly. Though the film informs us that a decade earlier she'd been one of Lawrence's crush-struck pupils ( which rather implausibly puts Parker's age in the film around 30), there's no chemistry or urgency to their nascent relationship.

Her character seems to exist purely because debut director Noah Murro and first-time screenwriter Mark Poirier know that in films of this nature, audiences expect resolution and rehabilitation to come through love. Thing is, these elements need to be woven together in a cohesive way to make them connect. A smart film would make it seem instinctive, not force its hand or try to flatter our intelligence with surface details and meaningless pomp. Smart People should practice what it preaches.

HOWLER OF THE WEEK

SMART PEOPLE: You might think a film about a literary professor who has written a scathing attack on academia entitled You Can't Read would have a solid grasp of its literary points of reference.

How embarrassing then that in Smart People, Dennis Quaid's prof is at one point pictured standing in front of his blackboard with the word "faerie" from Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene spelled as "fairie". Tsk tsk.