A refresher course in filmmaking shorthand
In "Smart People," Dennis Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a widowed English professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Wetherhold, a bearded, saturnine grouch, has just finished his latest book, which as the movie opens is on its way to oblivion. He has a strained relationship with his two children and embarks on a precarious romance with a local emergency-room physician that only threatens to send him further into his antisocial shell.
"Smart People" marks the feature debut of its director, Noam Murro, and screenwriter, Mark Jude Poirier. But this brand-new film bears an uncanny resemblance to movies that have gone before: When Murro cuts to an establishing shot of Wetherhold's stately Pittsburgh row house, viewers will be forgiven for expecting to see Michael Douglas, circa "Wonder Boys" in 2000, flop out to the front porch dressed in his frowzy pink bathrobe.
The movies' go-to guy
It's a cinematic archetype as reliable as the fish out of water and the blond in distress: the disheveled, misanthropic college professor, in the throes of writer's block (or some other form of publish-or-perish anxiety), living in book-lined solitude as a result of divorce, death or free-floating disgust with humanity.
There's little doubt why academia provides such a tempting backdrop for filmmakers (and novelists: David Lodge has made a cottage industry of sending up the ivory tower). As a wag once observed, the backbiting and politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so low. What better fodder for exploring human behavior at its most extreme, petty, adulterous, borderline homicidal and, finally, ridiculous?
Douglas' "Wonder Boys" character, the pot-smoking, psychologically blocked creative writing professor Grady Tripp, was a particularly amusing apotheosis of the type. But he was just one in a long line of memorable predecessors and successors: Think of rumpled Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Or stentorian John Houseman in "The Paper Chase." Or pedantic, dyspeptic and philandering Jeff Daniels in "The Squid and the Whale."
Most recently, a professor's long-ago affair with a student provided a plot point in the drama "Away From Her," and Philip Seymour Hoffman put his own lovable sad-sack spin on the character in "The Savages." Richard Jenkins, known for his supporting work in films ("Flirting With Disaster," "Rumor Has It") and television ("Six Feet Under"), is getting his big starring break as a lonely economics professor who embarks on a journey of connection and self-discovery in the new film "The Visitor."
