SMART PEOPLE
Directed by Noam Murro; written by Mark Jude Poirier; director of photography, Toby Irwin; edited by Robert Frazen and Yana Gorskaya; music by Nuno Bettencourt
With: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, Ellen Page, Ashton Holmes, David Denman, Christine Lahti, and Camille Mana. Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes

Reviewed by Joel Johnson

Like The Visitor, Smart People has a lead character (Dennis Quaid) who is a widowed college professor who has lost his appreciation for living. However, the two films go in very different directions, and the esthetic results are also quite different. The Visitor has a much narrower focus on how life is experienced by its lead character and his growing awareness of the difficulties encountered by his immigrant friends. There are few scenes in which The Visitor’s lead character does not appear. Smart People, from first-timers writer Mark Poirier and director Noam Murro is, on the other hand, an ensemble piece with the focus divided among several different characters that possess their own story strands. There’s a mesh of relationships that needs to be unraveled, and fitting the film into a pigeonhole as a particular kind of film is frustrating.

The apparent centerpiece of the film-based as much on star power as anything else-is a budding romance between Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Quaid) and his one-time student Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker). That the two would-be lovers work to thwart it is classic for a romantic comedy. Uncharacteristically for romantic comedies, the spotlight moves for extended periods to other aspects of the story that are unrelated to advancing the romance. This makes it much more of a slice-of-life film as we witness the collected goings-on of a group of connected people. These include the unresolved sibling clash between Lawrence and his ne’er-do-well brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), whom he never fails to point out is his “adopted brother.” Then there’s Lawrence’s daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page), an intensely driven intellectual high school senior with conservative political sensibilities. She has the same snarky vulnerability that Page displayed in Juno. Her relationships with her father and uncle are complex and marked by rapier repartee. Her scarcely concealed disdain for her father’s new girlfriend clearly makes her a potential stepdaughter from hell.

The film has several problems. Professor Wetherhold is an unsympathetic lead character, coming across as not only self-involved and insensitive but also arrogant and mean spirited. The audience is left not with the sense that the two lovers being together is a fulfillment of nature’s order but puzzlement that Dr. Hartigan should even care a whit about the professor. The relationship between Chuck and Vanessa that for a while is the most interesting in the film takes a turn both entirely out-of-character and adding a most unwelcome “ick” factor. One wonders how much footage of Christine Lahti’s Nancy ended up on the cutting room floor for the award-winning actress to end up as a bit-part secretary. The film doesn’t come to a satisfying ending as much as it simply stops. The film does have some genuinely funny exchanges-many of which are featured in the film’s trailer-and does maintain interest a good way into the film, but the romance takes over toward the end, and this is the least interesting part of the film. By the time it ends, there will be ambivalence between wishing the film had a slower, more natural resolution and relief that it is indeed finally over. There are bits to enjoy here and even more to look forward to from the writer and director, but Smart People just isn’t quite as smart as it would like to think that it is.