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Smart People (15) ***
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| Smart People: Watching television with an ageing musketeer... again |
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 fusty university professor who can wax lyrical about the poems of William Carlos Williams but is incapable of stringing together three monosyllabic words: 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.
Thus, when the professor is faced with the prospect of post-coital conversation, the best opening gambit he can bluster is: "I'm not used to condoms but I thought it went well.''
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 (Ashton Holmes), 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 (Haden 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.
Smart People 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, blind to the damage he wreaks with each huff of exasperation or roll of bloodshot eyes.
"I don't think you know how to be happy," Lawrence eventually tells his daughter.
"Well, you're not happy... and you're my role model," replies Vanessa sagely.
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.
See it at the Empire
11:15am Friday 16th May 2008
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