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Smart People
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: April 12, 2008

"I'm sorry I called you an arrogant asshole," says Sarah Jessica Parker, to which a smirking Dennis Quaid replies, "Actually, you called me a pompous asshole."

And there you have just one example of the phony and laborious dialogue that characterizes the new film Smart People.

Folks, I see a lot of bad movies as weeks go by, and in my occasional role of film-martyr, I have observed myself experiencing all kinds of unpleasant symptoms there in my theater seat—from joint pain to listlessness to binge eating, and so on. But I don't know if I've ever actually squirmed with such impatience and embarrassment as I exhibited today during an excruciating 90 minutes of filmgoing.

Smart People is about a cranky college professor who dresses like a shlub, and drives around in an old Saab, and always takes up two parking places, and condescends to everyone he meets... and all the while commits daily, ritual self-sabotage. Why is this guy such a great big drag? Well, for starters, he's portrayed by Dennis Quaid, who was once an actor but has now become merely a grimacer. For another, this college professor is cursed with such tremendous smarts that he can only be gratuitously contemptuous of himself and of others—kind of like an anti-Forrest Gump.

Yes, of course, this premise could make for an interesting movie. Heck, it has, in recent years, yielded at least three great movies, up to which this new film tries desperately and cynically and self-consciously to sidle. I'm referring to As Good as it Gets, Wonder Boys, and Sideways. All three of those films featured ironically bewildered middle-aged intellectuals, threatened in their miserable comfort zones by the opportunity to grow up. All three were also, thankfully, original and inspired works of art. But Smart People is like a pale, lifeless, formaldehyde-dripping Frankenstein's Monster, sewn from the reanimated tissue of other films. It even filches an entire actor from Sideways. Thomas Haden Church plays the exact same laid-back, man-child sidekick, stopping to smell the exact same roses, but without the great dialogue this time. In compensation, he flashes his presumably hilarious bare ass, not once but twice. And yet, in this movie, even nakedness comes across as insincere.

Smart People also stars Ellen Page, fresh off her Academy Award nomination for Juno. In the role of the professor's overachieving, smart-allecky, emotionally-detached daughter, Page succeeds in confirming that she is a talented and interesting actress. But in the end, her performance suffers from the same tetherless screenwriting that disables all of her co-stars. The film requires her teenaged character to fall in love with Church's much older character, only to be rejected by him, so that the audience may admire his nobility in mooching everything but the daughter off of the cranky professor character. And thus does the film comport itself, all subtlety-free equations, with manufactured behaviors on one side and the points they prove on the other.

Folks, can we at last retire the myth that "independent films" are automatically good? Heck, they aren't even automatically offbeat. Smart People is just another "genre picture," and every bit as calculated and unenterprising as big studio products like 10,000 B.C. or even American Gangster. As a matter of fact, this film insults its audience one step further by serving up a plot in which nothing happens. No doubt it fancies itself bogged down in "realism," but that wouldn't even be its crowning unintended irony. Smart People, with its anti-Gump "Intelligent is as intelligent does" sentiment doesn't do a single intelligent thing. It is exactly like it's own cranky professor hero—boring, preachy, uselessly literate, consistently loathsome, and demonstrably dumb.

Copyright © 2008 Theo Michelfeld