Older Reviews- Smart People

            A pretentious reincarnation of the indie film about the dysfunctional family, Smart People is like the self-proclaimed genius in the back of every classroom, throwing out self-important attempts at wit and relying too heavily on the studious actors in the front row. For as good as the screen writers think it is, you’d expect it to be better.

            Smart People stars Dennis Quaid as Lawrence Wetherhold, an arrogant literature professor at Carnegie Mellon who loses his driving privileges after falling off of a fence and suffering a seizure. Since his wife is long gone and his two kids (Ellen Page  as overachiever Vanessa and Ashton Holmes as slacker poet James) are too wrapped up in their own lives to care, Wetherhold is forced to rely on his laid back and irresponsible adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) and his ex-student turned doctor/girlfriend, Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker). It’s interesting that Chuck had been recruited as a chauffeur when he drives Wetherhold all of twice in the movie, most of the time leaving the professor to take a taxi, but I suppose they needed some excuse to bring the humor into the film. It certainly isn’t coming from anywhere else.

            There is a certain format to the modern indie film. There must be realistic performances, heavy-hitting humor, and a light, modern-folk oriented soundtrack. There must be a dysfunctional family with unusual circumstances that let the audience know that the creative team spent hours coming up with the new quirkiness. And while these films manage to not rip each other off, they don’t really feel different from each other after a while. Smart People is this sort of film, keeping the general format of predecessors like Little Miss Sunshine and Garden State, but it loses the humanity that other indie films are renowned for in favor of pretentious realism.

            The acting is all very good. As Vanessa, Ellen Page gives yet another Juno-esque performance as a snarky teenager, but for some reason overachiever Vanessa is significantly less likeable. Dennis Quaid is extremely believable as the nasty professor, but he fails to make the character enjoyable to watch. Sarah Jessica Parker is passable but bland, and only Thomas Haden Church manages to make his character fun to watch. The actors all did the best they could with the given script, and it would be unfair to call their performances anything less than wonderful. But even the best actors can’t carry a film without any other redeeming qualities.

            There is something to be said for a film that paces itself so poorly that the audience constantly feels the end must be coming and is shocked to learn that only an hour and forty minutes has passed since it started. The movie cannot be faulted on its realism, but realism only works if the film has other redeeming qualities. Every so often an interesting joke will come through, but there is only so much “intelligent” humor that one movie can take. Intellectuals will feel superior watching this film, as every other joke involves obscure SAT terminology or Victorian literature references, but understanding a joke doesn’t make it funny, just as relating to a film doesn’t make it enjoyable. Maybe next time the screen writer can look up “human” in his thesaurus, rather than letting the Smart People try to act it for him.

Grade: C