Bright Characters, Dumb Choices

Smart People Directed by Noam Murro

What a shame that Sex and the City turned Sarah Jessica Parker into Everywoman, considering she was once so nimble at vivisecting the dumb-blonde stereotype (think of her pitch-perfect performances in The First Wives Club and L.A. Story). Gone are the quirky details that made her so endearing even in dreck like Hocus Pocus; now it’s all slightly neurotic women carefully picking their way around men and their inexplicable mood swings. At least as Dr. Janet Hartigan in Smart People, Parker can interact with the always reliable Dennis Quaid.

Should Parker ever tire of her Carrie Bradshaw pigeonhole, she should examine Quaid’s choices to find a way out: He’s been taking roles over the last few years that not many actors his age wouldn’t touch. Six years after scoring an Oscar nom as the closeted gay husband in Far From Heaven, he plays prickly, brilliant and impatient Professor Lawrence Wetherhold, still reeling from the death of his wife a decade earlier and basically ignoring the emotional needs of his two children Vanessa (Ellen Page) and James (Ashton Holmes). He’s the kind of professor whose classes you dreaded in college, the one who never remembered your name, faced life with heavy shoulders, had a smoldering sense of rage at his lost opportunities and saw students as an impediment to his own work. What should follow is one of those smart-people-suffering-and-inflicting-pain-with-impeccable-vocabularies films, but neither director Noam Murro nor screenwriter Mark Poirier find a way to make any of these proud and guarded characters connect. Nor does it help that Janet brings about Lawrence’s gradual reawakening, while the snide Vanessa is left with Lawrence’s dippy adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church)—with whom she quickly forms a seriously unhealthy bond. As for Thomas, he’s ignored for most of the film, until he publishes a poem in The New Yorker.

But the introduction of Chuck—relaxed and unburdened by a tormented inner life—throws the movie off balance. Lawrence and Janet are paired off in a painfully faltering romance, while Chuck and Vanessa team up and then splinter apart for the film’s last half. Sure, Vanessa snips at Janet—a former student of Lawrence’s, naturally—for trying to date her father, but mostly they’re kept separate. And Vanessa wanders in and out of rooms and conversations dispensing uptight, prissy advice culled from a lonely life spent overachieving. It’s also unfortunate that Page followed Juno with this, in which she plays a variation on the quick-witted, acid-tongued teen that she does so brilliantly. She’s beginning to look less like the next big thing and more like just another quick-witted, acid-tongued teen actress.

There is a certain reassuring quality about Smart People for bright audiences, but most of the film keeps you in an agony of frustration. Being smart, like being rich, doesn’t make life easier; but anyone with a modicum of intelligence could consistently make better choices than these miserable characters. And although the film’s ending has a hopeful quality, there’s little doubt that happy endings for the Wetherhold clan are still far, far away.