Clever Caricatures Leave Little Time for Normality

SMART PEOPLE (15) STARS: Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, Sarah Jessica Parker. DIRECTOR: Noam Murro.

SARAH JESSICA PARKER’S face is everywhere at the moment as she stars in one of the season’s most eagerly awaited movies – Sex and the City.

However, first up she stars in this lowkey, pithy coming-of- middle-age tale.

The story revolves around a fusty university professor who can wax lyrical about the poems of William Carlos Williams but is incapable of stringing together three monosyllabic words: I, love, you.

Thus, when he is faced with the terrifying prospect of post- coital conversation, the best opening gambit he can bluster is: “I’m not used to condoms but I thought it went well.”

Unfortunately, the characters are painted as caricatures, defining them by idiosyncrasies. For the professor, it’s his fear of travelling in the passenger seat; for another family member, the habit of sleeping in the nude.

Cue repeated glimpses of a bare backside mooning defiantly from beneath the sheets.

The most well-adjusted person in the film is the teenage son, who embraces university life to the full.

Inevitably, he’s afforded the least screen time – normality just isn’t interesting.

Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Quaid), a selfobsessed authority on Victorian literature, is consistently rude to his students, doling out meagre grades for their hard work.

He has little time for excuses, and even less time for his estranged son James, who is more concerned with his girlfriend than academic excellence.

The only person to impact on Lawrence’s life, is his teenage daughter Vanessa (Page), an overachiever moulding herself in her old man’s image.

Humdrum routine is thrown into disarray when the professor’s pot- smoking adopted brother Chuck (Church) turns up uninvited and installs himself in the spare room.

Soon, the slacker sibling is offering Lawrence tips on dating a former student, ER doctor Janet Hartigan (Parker), and fending off the amorous advances of Vanessa.

Smart People has a wry one-liner for every crisis but the characters are sometimes too glib and their reactions too cute to be credible.

Quaid is surprisingly endearing as an emotionally stunted widower, blind to the damage he wreaks with each huff of exasperation or roll of bloodshot eyes.

Page’s wise-beyond-heryears teen bears striking similarities to her signature role in Juno, minus any of the self-deprecating charm or vulnerability, while Church’s funloving layabout conjures fonder memories of his Oscar-nominated turn in Sideways.

VERDICT: *****

Watch this if you liked:

Sideways The Squid and the Whale Juno

(c) 2008 Coventry Evening Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.