Smart People

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Dennis Quaid is excellent as a grouchy professor whose frozen heart is melted in a film that is all character and no story.

Four characters in search of a narrative arc, this debut directing effort is a bit too smart for its own good and a lot less smart than it thinks it is. What's more it spends so much time ingratiating itself with us, like a comedian giving knowing winks, that it ends up seeming much more irritating than it probably is.

But it's fun to watch Quaid, one of the more underrated and underused actors of his generation. Maybe because his career has taught him something of disappointment, he manages to communicate in the sag of his shoulders and the dry rasping mumble of his voice all the defeated resignation of his character.

He plays Lawrence Wetherhold, who has a job teaching Victorian literature at an upscale university while pursuing his life's work of being a contrarian curmudgeon. We know he's a jerk the minute we meet him because he parks his battered Saab across two parking spots. But he does it at an unnatural angle, the way a character in a movie might, rather than carelessly and thoughtlessly straddling the line the way real people do. It's as clumsy as a subtitle reading "Lawrence: Jerk" and the film is full of such touches - his daughter Vanessa (Page), an uptight Republican, has a Reagan poster on her bedroom wall.

Wetherhold could spend the rest of his contrarian life making his kids miserable and failing to remember his students' names. But simultaneously two arrivals upset his emotional applecart: his likeable loser brother Chuck (Church) shows up looking for money and a doctor and Janet (Parker), who was a Wetherhold student 20 years ago, tends Lawrence's injuries after a minor scrape.

We're going to find out what's eating Lawrence,  naturally, but the problem is that we never get why Janet, a smart woman, would be slightly interested in Wetherhold, who is not just a prick but deceitful one at that. It's really more a string of set pieces, beautifully filmed and featuring some truly outstanding acting. But as a story, it just doesn't work.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, Ellen Page.

Director:

Noam Murro

Running time:

95 mins

Rating:

M (offensive language & sexual references)

Screening:

SkyCity, Hoyts, Berkeley