“Smart People” starts with a familiar premise: a man drifts through life, unhappy and unsatisfied, until something causes him to re-connect. However, the central character, Carnegie Mellon English professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), is so unlikable that, for most of the movie, it’s hard to care what happens to him. You see, Lawrence is a pompous ass, condescending and egocentric, a student’s worst nightmare of a teacher, one who doesn’t even bother to learn his students’ names. Lawrence is a widower who shares his house with his 17-year-old daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page). He occasionally interacts with his older son, James (Ashton Holmes), who is a student at Carnegie Mellon and barely tolerates his adopted brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church). When an accident results in a fall and brain injury, Lawrence is forced to rely on the undependable Chuck as his driver. One evening, Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), the doctor who treated Lawrence in the E.R., sees him standing in the cold and offers him a ride home. This leads to some romantic possibilities, but Lawrence’s self-absorption gets in the way.
This is Dennis Quaid’s movie and as such, he does a splendid job of portraying a man who has so detached himself from life that he doesn’t care what he looks like or what other people think. However, because “Smart People” has such a capable supporting cast, it’s a shame their characters are so superficial. Ellen Page delivers her Vanessa lines much as she did for Juno, but we don’t know too much about Vanessa other than she is very aware of her intelligence and that she is lonely. Thomas Haden Church seems wasted as a character who provides some comic relief and occasionally prods Lawrence in the right direction. And the same goes for Sarah Jessica Parker as Lawrence’s love interest.
“Smart People” is a straight-forward movie, one that doesn’t try to do too much. Nevertheless, director Noam Murro and screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier should have been willing to tackle more. When you consider the themes flowing through this movie, the need for love and connection with other people, “The Visitor” does it better. (4/20/08)
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