Military Movies - Military Times

Solid performers can’t strike sparks in ‘Smart People’

1 1/2 stars — Filmmakers who aim to muscle into the increasingly crowded dysfunctional family comedy genre had better bring something new to the table or their flicks will end up as so much wallpaper.

The soft pastels of the tepid, mild-mannered “Smart People” might go well in the dining room.

Everything about the film, which seems much longer than its 95 minutes, seems built to gently rock viewers to sleep.

The plodding story too often feels forced and contrived, the script lacks a single truly memorable line, the soundtrack consists of acoustic noodling so forgettably generic that it makes John Mayer seem like a death-metal thrasher in comparison, and the abrupt ending feels like it was imported from another film.

Against that backdrop, the résumés of director Noam Murro and writer Mark Poirier speak volumes: Murro’s credits include the 2005 Sears commercial “Big World” — and little else — while novelist Poirier is dabbling in film scripts for the first time.

Dennis Quaid, with scruffy beard and bulging paunch, stars as Lawrence Wetherhold, a literature professor who has devolved into a bitter, self-absorbed misanthrope since his wife died several years earlier.

His novel has been rejected by every major publishing house. He’s utterly dismissive of his students, callously contemptuous of other faculty members, and obliviously neglectful of his two kids, James (Ashton Holmes) and Vanessa (Ellen Page of “Juno”).

James is a university student who has emotionally walled himself off from his father. High school senior Vanessa is an acerbic, hyperachieving Young Republican who has taken on the job of running the household.

Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) is Lawrence’s shiftless, ne’er-do-well but kind-hearted adoptive brother. (Why adopted? Who knows?) He’s dropped in for the first time in two years to hit up Lawrence for another loan for his latest doomed business scheme.

Into this fractious environment stumbles Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), an ER doctor who meets Lawrence after he falls off a fence while trying to get at his impounded car.

Turns out Janet was his student 10 years before and had a crush on him. She now has issues — “The hospital is littered with men she’s left in her wake,” a co-worker reveals — but since he’s a grump and she’s a pill, they bond over their mutual melancholia to begin a tentative relationship.

Low-wattage subplots sprout, the most substantive of which — more interesting than the main plot, if truth be told — has Chuck taking on the challenge of saving uptight Vanessa from becoming old before her time. This leads her to act on her feelings of abandonment over her father’s new dalliance by showing halting feelings for her adoptive uncle.

Talented performers laboring in vain to strike sparks is never pretty. Quaid’s character becomes exasperating as the film grinds on, while Parker’s Janet goes all the way from vague to opaque.

Even Page is hamstrung, able to flash only a shadow of the insouciance that made her so appealing in “Juno.”

Church fares the best as Chuck, the biggest mess in his family but also the most contented and emotionally secure. He steals scenes with his slyly ingratiating way of sliding into his dialogue.

But even he can’t produce any real laughs; the most that he (or any of the characters) got out of the packed crowd at my screening was a handful of polite chuckles.

The film’s title is a play on the fact that these highly intelligent people are dumber than mud about the important stuff, like human interaction. But that’s about as clever as it gets.

In a recent interview with the International Herald Tribune, Poirier cheerfully admits that “nothing much happens” in “Smart People.” He sums it up this way: “It’s about a depressed professor, and he’s a little less depressed at the end.”

That’s straight from the source, folks. Make of it what you will.

DISCUSS: The movie