Curtis Hanson (2000)

Michael Douglas is Grady Tripp, a professor of creative writing and published novelist on the verge of being a one-hit wonder.  Watching Douglas here makes his playing of Liberace in Behind the Candelabra this year seem all the more remarkable.  As a littérateur, he needn’t be Oscar Wilde but you’d hope for a bit of intellectual dynamism and turbulence.  Douglas’s Grady Tripp comes across as little more than increasingly harassed and exasperated, as the plot of this sort-of comedy thickens.  (It’s a sort of character-driven drama and a sort of crime caper too, but these various strands are an expression not of the film’s richness but of its being nothing in particular.)  Any impact that Douglas has derives from his persona seeming incongruous on a Pittsburgh campus (the film was shot mostly in and around Carnegie Mellon University).  Professor Tripp, whose latest wife has just left him, is having an affair with the university chancellor, Sara Gaskell, played by Frances McDormand.  (It never occurred to me unless the last ten minutes that the resolution of Sara and Grady’s relationship was going to be the resolution of the whole film.) There’d be more to McDormand’s performance if she suggested a public face for the chancellor somewhat different from her humorously frazzled private self.  Still, her wit is a relief beside Michael Douglas’s dullness – and the dullness of Sara’s husband Walter (Richard Thomas), the self-approving nerd who, as well as being cuckolded by Grady, is his head of department.  It’s inconceivable how the Gaskells ever got together.  Walter is principally devoted to his elderly, blind dog (an excellent performance) and also has a thing about Marilyn Monroe and her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.  Both these allegiances are crucial to the plot of Wonder Boys.

The most interesting character is James Leer, an unhappily gifted, movie-addicted student in Grady Tripp’s advanced creative writing class.  Tobey Maguire is really good – both funny and disturbing – in his early scenes, rattling off the details of film stars’ suicides (in alphabetical order – from Pier Angeli to Gig Young), weeping at the ‘loneliness’ of one of Professor Gaskell’s prized possessions, a fur-trimmed jacket that Marilyn once wore.  But, as the film goes on, James becomes sweetly innocuous – he just needed a bit of attentive sympathy from older men, father figure Grady and Terry Crabtree, Grady’s gay agent, who is entertainingly played by Robert Downey Jr.  I think the conventionalising of James epitomises what I found disappointing about Wonder Boys:  it is mildly entertaining, Curtis Hanson moves the action along smartly, and Steve Kloves’s adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel isn’t short of decent dialogue.  But mild entertainment seems to be as much as the filmmakers want to achieve.  When Grady, at a party, hears two other guests in conversation and the woman says, ‘I thought the adaptation was literary rather than cinematic’, Steve Kloves and Curtis Hanson sound as if they’re hoping to disarm criticism of their own efforts.  With Rip Torn and Katie Holmes, both more or less wasted.  Bob Dylan wrote a song for the film (‘Things Have Changed’) and the Academy took its opportunity to give him an Oscar.

4 October 2013