How fitting: In today’s dysfunctional character study “Smart People,” Dennis Quaid plays a Carnegie Mellon literature professor who corrects a paper on Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House.” Though the “dramedy” is meant to exude satiric deadpan attitude, “bleak” would be the operative word for this sluggish modicum of modern Pittsburgh gothic.
Gray skies, gray interiors, gray people. It’s a winter of discontent in the Wetherholds’ bleak house in the ’burbs.
This is especially true for its depressed patriarch, the curmudgeonly widower Lawrence (Quaid, slumming here as a middle-aged geek in exaggerated wrinkle makeup and add-on beer belly). The rest of the clan isn’t much happier, including fuddy-duddy Young Republican high schooler Vanessa (Ellen Page), disaffected college student James (Ashton Holmes) and their uncle, Lawrence’s ne’er-do-well brother (Thomas Haden Church).
As directed by feature film rookie Noam Murro from an original screenplay by novelist Mark Jude Poirier, nothing much of consequence happens in “Smart People.” The impetus for its meager character development comes out of Lawrence’s trivial struggles to get himself a life. The rest of the family will morph ever so slightly in tandem with the protagonist as he bumbles through attempts to find a publisher for his pretentious book, to vie for head of the English Department and form somekind of a relationship with a former student, the similarly flat-tempered physician Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker).
It is admirable that the piece tries to defy Hollywood genre strictures to tell an offbeat story of real people in real, everyday situations. The filmmakers also get points for attracting a cast of mostly likeable actors. In a long career, Quaid has built up a reservoir of good will that lends his loser Lawrence more sympathy than he might otherwise deserve. Likewise, last year’s breakout star Page uses her scene-stealing radiance to boost a thin character, even if her quipping kid shtick here echoes too often her title character in “Juno.”
The weak link in this slice-of-life picture, so dependent on thespian nuance, is Parker. She is terribly miscast in a part obviously written for a woman at least 10 to 15 years younger.
And, sadly, she can’t really act.
The now over-the-hill ingenue functions well when armored in her over-the-top “Sex and the City” wardrobe portraying some variation on her usual screen persona. But putting her in an acting showcase like “Smart People” wasn’t smart.
‘Smart People’
Two stars
» Starring: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Paker, Ellen Page
» Director: Noam Murro
» Rated XXX for language, brief teen drug and alcohol use, and for some sexuality
» Running time: 93 minutes
