User Reviews

Smart people doesn't have all that much originality. Dennis Quaid plays a professor, Sarah Jessica Parker plays a physician who was a former student of Quaid's. Ellen Page plays a Juno like character. And Thomas Hayden Church plays a loser. I told you there wasn't that much originality, but the movie works.

The film focuses on a professor(Dennis Quaid) who gets injured one day. also in one day, he meets a doctor(Sarah Jessica Parker) who was a former student of his. Also, when he comes home, he sees that his adoptive brother (Thomas Hayden Church). He starts seeing this doctor and ignores his daughter(Ellen Page). Also, one night his daughter and brother get drunk and she starts to have feelings for him.

Alright so there is a lot going on in the plot. This movie is really funny. To me, the humor mostly is from Thomas Hayden Church, and just the littlest things made me laugh in this film. Just read this right here.

"What are you doing?" "Watching a documentary on Snow apes". I thought that was funny. So it's not a great movie but I can't help but give it a thumbs up. To me, it seemed like you didn't get that much from Sarah Jessica Parker. Ellen Page plays the same character she does in every movie she is in. But that is okay because I like that character. I liked this movie.

Smart People:***/****

I went to this movie in part because of the NY Times review, which made it sound something like "the Squid and the Whale," or "the Savages." Those were excellent movies. This one is awful. I hardly know where to begin. The worst offense is that is a film that is trying very hard to create a tone of knowing realism; because nothing really happens, we are supposed to be gripped by the meaning of the characters and what they say, and perhaps be impressed by the acting. But the everything about this movie is implausible--every decision each character makes, every line that comes out of their mouths, is phony to the core. We have no idea why anyone does or believes anything. Quaid is terribly miscast here--he's supposed to be gritty and pompous at the same time, and he comes off just sounding as though he's trying very hard to imagine what an English professor might sound like, and he seems to re-imagine it every time he opens his mouth. He put on a lot of weight for the role though, so we know he's trying really hard. What a waste of time. Why would this film get a wide release, and "The Savages", an infinitely better movie, be confined to art houses?

Smart People pleasantly surprised me. I was prepared to enjoy the premise of the movie but not what I assumed would be some self-conscious Hollywood comedy shtick. The movie certainly had some weak elements but on balance I thought is was an easy way to spend two hours.

What made the movie work for me were the performances by Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Hayden Church. I've always liked Quaid. He's not only likable and a good actor, but every now then he takes some risks. Church was a standout, but I think that's as much because of the nature of the character he was playing. He managed to be flaky and sympathetic without being obvious about it. The surprise for me was Parker. I'd known her only through fleeting glimpses of Sex and the City (while clicking past to PBS Masterpiece Theater, of course), plus some of the awful previews of the Sex and the City movie...which means my impression of her was of an overly gracious television hit-show star, of a woman trying to translate that into over-paid Hollywood mega-lead but not making it yet (Jennifer Aniston as a role model?) and of a TV star who shows up immaculately gowned and groomed in People Magazine. What I saw was a skilled actress who never overplayed her hand and who had enough experience, talent and star quality to hold her own with ease against Quaid and Church.

While the relationship between Lawrence Wetherhold (Quaid) and Janet Hartigan (Parker) was a little ambivalent, I think that was due to the writing, not the actors. I particularly appreciated that Quaid and Parker played more-or-less their real ages. Quaid is in his mid- fifties and looked it for his character, including the small paunch. Parker is now in her early forties, a dangerous time for a female in Hollywood who wants to play leads. Her close-ups, her make-up and her lighting didn't try to cover the little wrinkles around the eyes. As head of ER in a major hospital, her character would have been in the late thirties or early forties; I wound up admiring Parker's willingness to be true to her character.

On the weak side, Smart People quickly established the kind of character, teacher and parent Lawrence Wetherhold had become. We watched him try to change a little, but Wetherhold was essentially Wetherhold for most of the movie. There wasn't enough wit to keep him amusing and there wasn't enough growth to get us, at least me, really involved with the character. Hartigan's unhappiness with Wetherhold in the New York hotel room seemed to me to be merely a writer's device to keep the story going and add some angst that could later be resolved. Janet just seemed to fade away at the end and Wetherhold's epiphany, which was due to his discovered love for Janet, came on awfully fast. And mark me down as a curmudgeon, but precocious teen-agers (and pre-pubescent tykes) just seem to me to be an easy way for a writer to get cheap laughs. Vanessa Wetherhold did nothing for me that couldn't have been accomplished with a smaller amount of screen time. And while Ellen Page may develop into a gifted actor, she'd better be careful she doesn't fall into mannerisms. She was teetering on the brink with this movie.

But to end on a high note, let's hear it for Christine Lahti. She played the department secretary who was assisting Wetherhold. She made a first-class impression in a small part. I almost wish Wetherhold had noticed her before he noticed Janet.

Some people reviewing this movie have compared it favorably to Juno, claiming it's several steps above it. The only resemblance I see between the two is that Ellen Page plays in both. The principle character, a middle-aged, pot-bellied Professor Wetherhold (played by Dennis Quaid), is so arrogant and self-absorbed that he is oblivious to everyone and everything around him, including his own children. And we learn at the very beginning that he's clearly an over-the-top asshole by the way he parks his car.

We are led to believe that perhaps his pomposity stems from the untimely death of his wife, whom he claims to have loved deeply. Given his behavior and mind-set, it's very hard to imagine him in love with anyone but himself, and we learn from the SJP character that he was just as pompous and off-putting when she was a freshman, long before his wife passed away. Of course, at the end of the film he redeems himself through learning of his girlfriend's pregnancy (the girlfriend played, of course, unstintingly by SJP), changing his outlook on life and evincing interest in the lives of others. And how did the girlfriend get pregnant? We learn that this brilliant man couldn't manage to put a condom on correctly. I mean, Come on! And only in America are people shown having made love with their underclothes on.

This film might have addressed the issue of intellectuals in the contemporary US in a probing and intelligent fashion (dare I say here a "smart" fashion), such as was done recently in Starting Out in the Evening. Instead, we are presented with an overbearingly self-centered professor whose sole life ambitions are to achieve becoming chairman of the English Department and getting his book published and his snot-nosed seventeen-year-old daughter whose sole life ambitions are to achieve a perfect SAT score and admission to Stanford. Are we to take these pathetic people as exemplars of intellectual life? One redeeming feature though of the film is its portrayal of the daughter-father relationship of a man who has lost his wife and allows his daughter to assume the wife's (non-sexual) role and in the process allowing her to direct and orchestrate his life, even to the point of often being relegated to the role of child with herself as parent. This subplot of Smart People is done better than the other aspects of the story, but doesn't go far enough to redeem the movie.

Overall, this movie plays it safe by trucking to blatant stereotypes who fail to elicit our sympathy or involvement. Except for my point above about the daughter-father relationship, Smart People is as predictable as the course of the sun traversing the sky. Whereas I found Juno fresh and its characters creative and appealing enough to grab my attention, in Smart People they're overall downbeat and jejune.

I give it a 6 out of 10.

I have a feeling that this film may have been interesting if only I could have heard most of the dialogue above the terribly intrusive musical score. Why did the music need to be so loud? If the dialogue was unimportant enough to drown it with unpleasantly loud music then why include it? What a waste of time! Pity really. I may have missed a good movie! Although I am left wondering whether I might have enjoyed the story, I cannot help agreeing with another commentator that there's nothing new or very different about it. I also wonder why an ex-student would want to give a guy who was as boring as Quaid was at the first dinner a second chance. And can anyone please tell me how a grown man can "misuse" a condom???

Dennis Quaid in this guise would make a wonderful understudy for Harrison Ford - but that's only a passing comment.