A rom-com about prickly academics turns into old-fashioned mush
Sarah Jessica Parker has a crush on Dennis Quaid in the rom-com Smart People
Echoes of Michael Douglas’s creatively mired professor from Wonder Boys and Paul Giamatti’s raging midlife crisis in Sideways are obvious in Dennis Quaid’s furiously self-important academic in Smart People. Lawrence Wetherhold is widowed and increasingly dislocated from the rest of humanity. His poet son can’t talk to him; his aggressively intellectual, right-wing daughter (Ellen Page) encourages his worst superiority tendencies.
But Lawrence finds his cantankerous certainties undermined when two new people arrive in his life. One is a former student (Sarah Jessica Parker), now a doctor, who still nurses a crush on her ex-professor. The other is his ageing slacker stepbrother (Thomas Haden Church), who exists in a cloud of dope smoke and excuses but seems better adjusted than any of the other characters... [article continues]
No comments:
Post a Comment