"What’s it like to be stupid?” asks Vanessa Wetherhold (Ellen Page) in a moment of drunken clarity of a couple of skanky-looking girls in line for the restroom at a bar. If we’re to believe the smarmy, superficial Smart People, the answer is that it’s pretty great. Vanessa is an overachieving high-schooler whose life revolves around studying for the SAT and attending Young Republicans meetings; her father, Lawrence (Dennis Quaid), is a college English professor who spends all his time imparting his alleged wisdom to his indifferent students and trying to get his book of obscure literary criticism published. They’re both monumentally unhappy and self-centered people, completely lost in their intellectual world at the expense of the emotional one, and crippled even years later by the death of Lawrence’s wife, mother to Vanessa and her older brother James (Ashton Holmes).
It’s Vanessa’s and Lawrence’s intellects that are holding them back, and Lawrence’s adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), who might best be described as a galoot, is the book-stupid but intuitively wise guy who’s going to set them on the right path. He shows up uninvited to move into the Wetherhold house, where he gets Vanessa to smoke pot and drink beer and helps her learn to stand up for herself and be her own person. The movie explains Chuck’s presence, plot-wise, by having Lawrence suffer a contrived and easily forgotten “trauma-induced seizure” after a fall, which forces him to lose his driving privileges for six months and require Chuck’s chauffeur services.
It also places him in the path of emergency-room doctor and fellow smart person Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), who’s in touch enough with real life that her smartness isn’t quite as debilitating, and she and Lawrence engage in a forced and not particularly believable romance. He’s a pompous, inconsiderate asshole; she’s a whiny, judgmental bitch—will they fall in love? Sadly, the answer is yes, since this is a skin-deep mainstream gloss on someone’s idea of an indie film, where nothing really bad ever happens, and everyone’s problems are solved by the time the credits roll (and then snapshots of the happy family oversell the point during those credits).
The solid performances keep Smart People from being entirely insufferable, even if the actors are never able to convince us that these characters are anything other than complete jackasses. Quaid plays a sort of cuddlier version of Jeff Daniels’ character in the much more serious and biting The Squid and the Whale; he may be condescending, but he condescends out of good intentions, and he really does love his kids even if he resents them a little bit. Page once again demonstrates her aptitude at playing hyper-articulate teenagers, channeling some Alex P. Keaton in the process, and Church draws on his sitcom roots for the prototypical moocher-who-crashes-on-your-couch performance.
Beneath the veneer of intellectualism (which is really only a cover for anti-intellectualism), that’s what this film boils down to: a sitcom. And not a particularly funny one, either, since director Noam Murro and screenwriter Mark Poirier, both first-timers, opt for soft drama over real laughs, and end up with a movie that’s neither humorous nor affecting—and certainly not very smart.
Smart People
** 1/2
Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, Sarah Jessica Parker
Directed by Noam Murro
Rated R