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People like, love and hate ‘Smart People'

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The audience in the screening I attended of “Smart People,” starring Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker, had mixed reactions. Actually, I'd say, that opinions were split nearly half and half, with me leaning toward the “liked it” side of the line. Director Noam Murro gives us a witty, intellectual, unpretentious film filled with characters who are logically stressed and anxious to connect to an outside world. Even with these positives, however, I waver between love and hate.

Quaid plays widowed and unhappy English professor Lawrence Wetherhold a man who has alienated his son James (Ashton Holmes) and turned his daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) into an overachieving, friendless teen who dotes on her father and who has made it her personal goal to take care of him. After a silly accident involving a car impound lot, a testy former student and a fall from a security fence, Lawrence lands in the hospital and meets Janet (Parker), another former student, to whom he is instantly attracted - even though he does not remember her from class. Almost simultaneously, his free-loading adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) shows up at his door. The more carefree Chuck behaves, the more the already dysfunctional family falters, or so it seems. Ultimately “Smart People” is about a super-intelligent, highly dysfunctional family whose members are simply too dumb to work out how to make their lives work.

When I say I like “Smart People,” I do mean it, but I can't say I wholly loved it. In the same vain as another academic dysfunctional family, “The Squid and the Whale,” “Smart People” fails to be the biting satire I am assuming the producers hoped it would be. Still, the characters are engaging enough and the story intriguing enough to have held my attention.

Sporting sagging shoulders, a shaggy beard and a protruding paunch, Quaid plays down-and-out with as much zeal as he does other roles, but he often he just did not convince me that he was anything more than Quaid playing this pompous, super-smart and seemingly uncaring man. He is better suited to comedy perhaps.

While certainly an academically astute man, Lawrence's own son James even tells his father that there is a lot he does not know - and he is right. He hardly knows his own children or even himself for that matter.

Chuck (Church in excellent form) is more switched on to the pursuit of happiness than his super-bright adopted family. First-time screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier's script has some satirical teeth, but the on-screen chemistry of his characters doesn't always convince - particularly between Quaid's professor and Parker's physician Janet. Lawrence is so arrogant and brash it's nearly impossible to understand the attraction. The relationship between Chuck the pot-smoking, ne'er-do-well and his 17-year-old never felt real to me. I did enjoy the interactions between Chuck and Lawrence and those between Lawrence and his colleagues and students.

Reading back over this review, I can see where I completely contradict myself. I say I enjoyed the film - and I did - yet I find more to criticize than to praise. But there is just something about this family and the film's underlying message that appeals to me. I did feel for Lawrence, so ignorant in his life and in his classroom that all the academic smarts in the world can't save him from himself, and he is passing this legacy on to his daughter. Chuck has little going on in his life, but he manages to teach his “brother” a thing or two. Janet, however, perplexes me. This bright woman, who is an accomplished doctor, manages to falter badly in love, choosing to act on a college girl's crush on her condescending professor.

Online, “Smart People” is receiving about a 50/50 split with critics. I fall directly in the middle of this. I enjoyed the journey in spite of the annoyances. Here are quirky, slightly damaged people who, like so many of us, are moving in a daunting world, trying desperately to make some sense of it all. Who can't appreciate smart people who are dumb?

I am placing a C+/B- in my gradebook. The film - rated R for language, brief teen drug and alcohol use and for some sexuality - is not for everyone, but “Smart People” will have its fans.

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