Vanessa Wetherhold (Ellen Page) and her father, Lawrence (Dennis Quaid), don’t feel they have to do charitable works — or even be nice — because their intellectual accomplishments contribute enough to the world.
Two people arrive on the scene and turn that assumption on its head in “Smart People,” a film that, despite agreeable performances and some witty lines, is all too predictable.
Lawrence is a curmudgeonly English professor at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. The only reason we might feel sympathy for the guy is that he still hasn’t recovered from the death of his wife some years before.
He injures his head through his own stubbornness and is treated by Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), a young doctor who, though he doesn’t remember this, was a student of his as an undergraduate. She had a schoolgirl crush on him that’s quickly rekindled, although it’s constantly threatened by his boorish behavior.
Vanessa is a high-school student on the fast track to a successful career and dismal social life. She has no friends at school and she’s even (horrors!) a Young Republican — a sure sign of loserdom in the movies if ever there were one.
Increasingly ignored by her newly smitten father, Vanessa quickly bonds with the easygoing Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) — only Lawrence’s adopted brother, as the prof is quick to point out — who moves in to drive Lawrence around after his injury.
In his debut, director Noam Murro aims at verisimilitude and mostly succeeds. Mr. Quaid and Mr. Church have completely buried their movie-star good looks. And both Mr. Murro and novelist Mark Poirier, also making his film debut here, have captured the feeling of academic life.
The problem is that it’s all in the service of a fairly mediocre film.
It doesn’t crackle like you’d expect a movie filled with this kind of talent to do. Miss Page carried an entire movie last year in “Juno,” but she’s not given enough material here to do more than remind us of the tough-yet-vulnerable teens we’ve seen on-screen before.
The best bit of the film is a clever satire on the publishing business, when Lawrence, whose academic tome doesn’t interest many publishers, finally gets a bite. Penguin wants to edit it heavily and market it as an in-your-face opinion tome titled “You Can’t Read.” If the filmmakers had made a farce instead of a feel-good drama — and the plot is well-suited to it — “Smart People” might have made the grade.
**1/2
TITLE: “Smart People”
RATING: R (language, brief teen drug and alcohol use, some sexuality)
CREDITS: Directed by Noam Murro. Written by Mark Poirier.
RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes
WEB SITE: www.smartpeople-themovie.com
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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