Some people reviewing this movie have compared it favorably to Juno, claiming it's several steps above it. The only resemblance I see between the two is that Ellen Page plays in both. The principle character, a middle-aged, pot-bellied Professor Wetherhold (played by Dennis Quaid), is so arrogant and self-absorbed that he is oblivious to everyone and everything around him, including his own children. And we learn at the very beginning that he's clearly an over-the-top asshole by the way he parks his car.
We are led to believe that perhaps his pomposity stems from the untimely death of his wife, whom he claims to have loved deeply. Given his behavior and mind-set, it's very hard to imagine him in love with anyone but himself, and we learn from the SJP character that he was just as pompous and off-putting when she was a freshman, long before his wife passed away. Of course, at the end of the film he redeems himself through learning of his girlfriend's pregnancy (the girlfriend played, of course, unstintingly by SJP), changing his outlook on life and evincing interest in the lives of others. And how did the girlfriend get pregnant? We learn that this brilliant man couldn't manage to put a condom on correctly. I mean, Come on! And only in America are people shown having made love with their underclothes on.
This film might have addressed the issue of intellectuals in the contemporary US in a probing and intelligent fashion (dare I say here a "smart" fashion), such as was done recently in Starting Out in the Evening. Instead, we are presented with an overbearingly self-centered professor whose sole life ambitions are to achieve becoming chairman of the English Department and getting his book published and his snot-nosed seventeen-year-old daughter whose sole life ambitions are to achieve a perfect SAT score and admission to Stanford. Are we to take these pathetic people as exemplars of intellectual life? One redeeming feature though of the film is its portrayal of the daughter-father relationship of a man who has lost his wife and allows his daughter to assume the wife's (non-sexual) role and in the process allowing her to direct and orchestrate his life, even to the point of often being relegated to the role of child with herself as parent. This subplot of Smart People is done better than the other aspects of the story, but doesn't go far enough to redeem the movie.
Overall, this movie plays it safe by trucking to blatant stereotypes who fail to elicit our sympathy or involvement. Except for my point above about the daughter-father relationship, Smart People is as predictable as the course of the sun traversing the sky. Whereas I found Juno fresh and its characters creative and appealing enough to grab my attention, in Smart People they're overall downbeat and jejune.
I give it a 6 out of 10.
We are led to believe that perhaps his pomposity stems from the untimely death of his wife, whom he claims to have loved deeply. Given his behavior and mind-set, it's very hard to imagine him in love with anyone but himself, and we learn from the SJP character that he was just as pompous and off-putting when she was a freshman, long before his wife passed away. Of course, at the end of the film he redeems himself through learning of his girlfriend's pregnancy (the girlfriend played, of course, unstintingly by SJP), changing his outlook on life and evincing interest in the lives of others. And how did the girlfriend get pregnant? We learn that this brilliant man couldn't manage to put a condom on correctly. I mean, Come on! And only in America are people shown having made love with their underclothes on.
This film might have addressed the issue of intellectuals in the contemporary US in a probing and intelligent fashion (dare I say here a "smart" fashion), such as was done recently in Starting Out in the Evening. Instead, we are presented with an overbearingly self-centered professor whose sole life ambitions are to achieve becoming chairman of the English Department and getting his book published and his snot-nosed seventeen-year-old daughter whose sole life ambitions are to achieve a perfect SAT score and admission to Stanford. Are we to take these pathetic people as exemplars of intellectual life? One redeeming feature though of the film is its portrayal of the daughter-father relationship of a man who has lost his wife and allows his daughter to assume the wife's (non-sexual) role and in the process allowing her to direct and orchestrate his life, even to the point of often being relegated to the role of child with herself as parent. This subplot of Smart People is done better than the other aspects of the story, but doesn't go far enough to redeem the movie.
Overall, this movie plays it safe by trucking to blatant stereotypes who fail to elicit our sympathy or involvement. Except for my point above about the daughter-father relationship, Smart People is as predictable as the course of the sun traversing the sky. Whereas I found Juno fresh and its characters creative and appealing enough to grab my attention, in Smart People they're overall downbeat and jejune.
I give it a 6 out of 10.