Smart People

Dennis Quaid plays an English professor out of touch with his body and his best interests in “Smart People,” just out on DVD. His wife has died and her absence has undermined his perspective on life and his joie de vivre; he now drags his carcass through his teaching and family duties, as if barely aware of the outside world, except as it throws occasionally obstacles in his path, which usually calls forth various kind of nasty remarks that are also edged with black humor. He’s middle aged but he shuffles along like a round-shouldered curmudgeon, an older crouch with few redeeming qualities. He plots to avoid contact with his students who seem to keep him in a state of constant irritation; nor can he remember any of their names, which irritates them. However, he is intellectually alive enough to have a book he is trying to get published. His specialty seems to be Victorian Literature. Quaid plays him as if he is suffering from acute introversion and emotional paralysis. He is “smart” only in the bookish sense. His life otherwise is a mess.

He has a daughter named Vanessa, played by newcomer Ellen Page. (She made “Smart People” before she was in “Juno.”) She is a clone of her father and attempts to fill in for the deceased mother/wife, by cooking and doing what she can to keep the house in order, if not exactly clean. She is as bookish and cut-off as her dad; she has no friends and like her father she tends to insult everyone she has to deal with at home and away. Her opinion of her intelligence is very high, and proof of her smarts is she has just been accepted to Stanford. When she arrives there she thinks her life will begin. She has nothing to do with boys and sex is an unknown continent to her. In sum, she has a shutdown personality and tends to be a junior version of her father’s arrogant pomposity. There is also a brother, but after we meet him he fades away. Why he is even there to start with is a mystery.

Completing this family of brilliant idiots is a brother played by Thomas Haden Church, a free spirit or freeloader, depending how you want to see him. He is gruff, lazy, and unreliable on the practical level, but basically the honest person in this brainy mélange of emotionally stunted academic types, and the one with more proactive insight than the others. He takes on Vanessa as a special project, trying to get her out of the black hole she has created for herself. He is the one who is more psychologically astute and has good zingers to make his points. He’s also one of the funnier characters in the movie.

There is one other vital character, a doctor played by Sarah Jessica Parker, an ex-student of the professor who apparently has had a log-time crush on him, and while treating him for a fall and concussion lets him know she’s interested and available. But she is damaged goods and full of doubt and hesitations about the relationship. The professor has been hibernating since his wife died seven years ago, so he is a little slow on the uptake with the woman, but finally he takes the bait, hook, line, and sinker. But she still vacillates. There is much comedy in their attempt to work things out.

As you have probably guessed by now, “Smart People” is an ironic title. As a veteran of the academic world, I would vouch for the presence of such people in University life, folks who are, on the one hand, bookish and formally intelligent, but leave much to be desired on the levels of perceptive insight, existential decision-making and fire in the belly. They tend to live contrary to what they really need to do. Because they live in their heads they tend to keep feelings bottled up, as if they were vipers that can never be let loose. All things considered, the dialogue in the movie is crisp, clever, and amusing. Quaid does a decent job of portraying the rumpled professor who finally comes around to realize he has much work to do on himself, not on his lectures. Ellen Page has a style of her own already; she a real comer as an actress I think. But her diet has to improve; she is as skinny as a pencil. It made me wonder if she is anorexic. Thomas Haden Church is a unique talent, a bear of a man who acts in an understated way, using his strong, deep voice for emphasis. So taking everything into account, it is an amusing, insightful and diverting movie with a smattering of chuckles and wit that is well played by an able cast.

.