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Matinee Melee: ‘Smart’ tries way too hard

By: Holly Leber
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By: Casey Phillips
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Casey Phillips: I was excited about “Smart People” from the first time I saw the trailer. Ellen Page put on one of last year’s most memorable performances in “Juno” and both Dennis Quaid and Thomas Haden Church (most recently of “Spider-Man 3”) are high on my list of must-see actors. Yet, somehow, this film managed to leave me feeling cool. As expected, I loved Page, who, without a doubt, put on the film’s best performance as Quaid’s overachieving teenage daughter, Vanessa. But the film’s tone is so dour (from the stark colors to the characters) and its dialogue is so artificial that it felt like fighting upstream to enjoy any of it.

Holly Leber: I definitely expected a smart, charming, quirky picture. Instead, I think the movie tried so hard to be smart and quirky that it didn’t really achieve too much of either, and it certainly lacked charm. Ellen Page can deadpan with the best of them and she was spot-on casting for this role, but most of the characters were written as so unlikeable, so caught up in their own muck and mire, that they barely seemed to care about anything but their own misery.

Casey: Yeah, bleak sums it up. It’s like the whole film is suffering from a sort of social coma. In the opening scene, Quaid’s character, Dr. Lawrence Wetherhold, tries (and fails) to remember the names of students who have taken several of his courses. This sets up how out of touch he is, and the rest of his family isn’t much better. Every character is plagued with an utter inability to deal with their character flaws, their bad habits or each other. In what I’m sure was an intentional pun, the characters are so socially inept that the most appropriate subtitle for this film is “are dumb.”

Holly: Well, the tagline of the film is “sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn,” and the movie proves that point for 95 minutes straight. Lawrence is slogging through life not knowing how to function as a human being since his wife died and not caring to connect with, or show much respect to, anyone. Vanessa is dead set on looking down at all the people around her, and Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker, who, I’m sorry is just not a good actress) runs hot and cold, holds other characters at arms’ length and is still holding some sort of grudge about a bad grade she got when she was Dr. Wetherhold’s student 20 years ago. Apparently the (lady’s and) gentleman’s C went by the wayside before the late ’80s. The only character who had any real empathy for anyone else was Chuck (Church), Lawrence’s ne’er-do-well adopted brother (emphasis on adopted). The smart people who have so much to learn, unfortunately, don’t seem to do much learning.

Casey: Let’s hope the screenwriters learned their lesson. The film leaves a lot of back story completely undeveloped, the most glaring example being why Chuck is adopted at all. It doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the film, and it just annoyed me not having it explained. And while I really enjoyed his interplay with Vanessa, they take a detour into a creepy pseudo-romance that I found more than a little uncomfortable. I will say that Quaid’s efforts to gain weight for this film really paid dividends in making him more believable as a morose wreck of a man. I can’t say I hated the film, but I certainly left feeling as emotionally weighed down as its characters.

Holly: I think between the casting of Page and Church, we were probably both expecting a witty, clever film in the vein of “Juno” or “Sideways,” and “Smart People” simply does not fall in with those movies. I kept waiting to feel for any of the characters, but it just didn’t happen. “Smart” can be a relative term, and this film is not as intelligent as it could have been with a more developed script and more fleshed out characters.