Ben Saw: Smart People

Right from the start, if you name your movie Smart People then you are asking for trouble. Really, there's not a lot of ways it can play out effectively: you can create a farce so that the title takes on an ironic edge (Monty Python's Meaning of Life), you can really own the title by creating a movie whose characters demonstrate their intelligence effortlessly and with aplomb just by being themselves (History Boys) or you can create a movie in which 'smartness' is the one tiny quirk given to an otherwise formulaic drama. The last option, from a quality movie perspective is obviously the worst.

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Of course Smart People, showing balls the size of a second trimester chipmunk fetus, goes with the last option. Take your standard-issue pseudo-indie drama/light comedy which is usually about non-Hollywood-standard relationships (older couple or big age gap or multi-ethnic or whenever there aren't two pretty young people, usually white) and is inevitably set in a location that 'doesn't get enough exposure' and then add whatever superficial twists you want to your main character. Steve Carrell's Dan In Real Life is, for me, the ur-example of this sub-genre……I actively disliked Dan In Real Life. I did not like Smart People much better.


However, that kind of wannabe-indie adult drama/comedy is precisely the template used. You have two non-Hollywood standard pairings: a real 'older person' couple and a fake 'older person-teenager' couple. You have a non-standard location in glorious Pittsburgh. You have the superficial twist in the aforementioned 'smartness'. And then you have all the other workhorses of the sub-genre putting in overtime: soft, acoustic indie music, half-hearted political messages, long, stationary shots of quirky behavior in lieu of genuinely witty writing and directing, 'old dogs learning new tricks', inadvisable facial hair.


So what do Smart People's smart people do with their time? I'm doing this offline and I'm hardly going to watch the damn movie again, so I won't know characters' names. Dennis Quaid's character is the main character, a selfish, arrogant jerk of a literature professor at Carnegie-Mellon (hence Pittsburgh). His wife died at some point and it made him sad. He also is a very distant father to his kinda-smart son (whose character borders on irrelevance) and very smart anal-retentive daughter Ellen Page. Quaid's layabout brother (Thomas Hayden Church) shows up to Quaid's major chagrin but, through deus ex machina, Quaid hits his head and requires a chauffeur for 6 months, so Church can stay. At the same time, Quaid's doctor at the hospital post-injury is Sarah Jessica Parker, who is a student of his from about ten years ago and used to have a crush on him. Quaid and Parker start dating while Church tries to get Page's character to loosen up which Page interprets as interest and so she starts pursuing the lucky bastard despite his protestations. Both Quaid's and Page's characters main hurdles are their own assholishness and self-absorbtion which keep them from playing with others nicely. This meanders on until it doesn't and then the movie wraps itself up with the sub-genre standard 'optimistically muddling through' happy ending.


The characterizations are shocking both in how lazy they are and how impossible they are to like. Quaid's character a consists of going from a self-important windbag to a self-important windbag that wants to keep a girl around. Parker's character approaches pure-cardboard status which I imagine is also the texture of her skin and Page's character is defined mostly by smarm, as well as being a polticial near impossibility (but we won't go there). I think Page is a genuinely talented actress and she shows some chops once her character shows vulnerability and emotion, but the character is written in this bipolar fashion where she is this tremendously shallow caricature 80% of the time (an extremely uptight and proper, elitist nerd who, in a stunning act of cognitive dissonance by the writers, drops F-bombs regularly), but 20% of the time behaves in a semi-real fashion. Unsurprisingly, Church is the runaway success amongst the four: he drags the script along kicking and screaming in his mostly successful effort to make his character multi-dimensional, believable and, refreshingly, likable.

The likability question is kind of a fascinating one in this movie: I felt like I was actually being challenged in the first half of the movie "I dare you to like these characters! I have constructed this movie so that you, the viewer, wishes death and sadness on all of them!" This is a movie that is desperate to prove that the titular smart people are, in fact, smart. To accomplish this, they give Quaid, Page, Parker and a few others periodic trivia tibits to drop clumsily in to conversation. This is not the conversational technique of a smart person, this is the conversational technique of a person who is hoping to convince other people that they're smart. The arrogance and intellectual bullying are part of what make these characters unwatchable at times, but it is done with no sense of them being real people: when Ellen Page tries to defend her crappy cooking by saying that the recipe was original to the French royal court it will be very clear what I mean. This is like trying to defend Paul Molitor by saying that you like the Brewers' uniforms and it definitely does not make your character seem smart. Of course, in the second half the movie decides to forget all that and throw out every character except church for more acceptable standards for Hollywood pap: Parker's motivations stay as murky as before as she morphs in to 'the girlfriend', Quaid is the guy who's trying to redeem himself through love and Page is the precocious teen who secretly has lots of growing up to do. It's a pretty jarring tone shift.

Another aspect of the likability question: the soundtrack. I am not a very music-centred guy in movies although there are plenty of exceptions. For one thing, I cannot stand the Juno style of soundtrack where every song is acoustic indie music, and often unbearably cutesy at that. Smart People manages to commit that sin as well.

The movie does have some positives. Page has a few moments where you can tell that she really did put work in to the character, most notably the bar scene where you can tell how her character's intelligence has been an enormous social liability for her. Mostly, though, the burden of not sucking falls squarely on Church who really is the only consistently watchable part of the movie. He manages to be charismatic while also being more than slightly pathetic (if principled). People who are willing to be kicked around make for interesting characters in movies and Church is not an exception here.

Overall, though, this is a bad movie. It's certainly a lazy movie, substituting shots of Church's ass for actual comedy, but it's also shallow and remarkably off-putting. I knew the reviews were bad in the first place, so why did I see it? When Ellen Page is in stuff, I try to see it, and that's really as complicated as it gets. Despite her radiant beauty, though, this movie is bad and I recommend it to no one except possibly those strange people that badly need to see Dennis Quaid with a beard.

Grade: C-