SMART PEOPLE - Blu-ray review

This one comes from the producer of "Sideways" and stars Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, and Thomas Hayden Church. How can you go wrong?

Well, Mark Jude Poirer hadn't written the screenplay for a full-length feature before this, and Noam Murro hadn't directed one. Together, they tried to make a smart movie about "Smart People," but ended up giving us a main character who seems "Lost in Translation" and supporting characters that never seem to interact as significantly as we want. Some of the lines are smart, some of the scenes are smart, and Poirer and Murro certainly show promise. But for a film about intelligent people, there isn't much in the way of logic or believable motivation for what they say and do. It's as if Poirer tried to throw in an offbeat element here and an oddball element there, thinking it would do the trick. But smart writing and a collage of eccentricity are not the same thing as a viable narrative structure. While Poirer creates characters with traits that you believe, there's not enough energy here. The most we get comes from a taboo-breaker between a "bad" uncle and his 17-year-old Young Republican niece, and even then the plug seems to have been pulled too quickly before anything really interesting could have happened.

It's a little more striking in Blu-ray, but you don't have to look any further than the films this one will remind you of to make mental comparisons and pinpoint the problems. Dennis Quaid plays a self-absorbed English professor (why is it always English???) who is so into his own book on "The Price of Postmodernism blah-blah-blah" that he doesn't know (or particularly care about) his students, doesn't like or respect his colleagues, doesn't know much about his two college-aged children (Ellen Page and Ashton Holmes), hates his brother (Thomas Hayden Church) whom he insists on describing with the adjective "adopted," and treats anyone he comes in contact with as if they were inferior. We're to believe that this guy wants to be department chair, yet he hasn't cared enough about the department to attend meetings for the past several years. And he's anti-social. Why would he want to be an administrator? He's been teaching for so long that he's somehow grown into a mantle of entitlement, but so many publishers have passed on his life's work that he's destined to become "dead wood" in a few short years. We're led to believe that what's partly to blame is the loss of his wife, whose clothing he insists on keeping in the closet, though it's been years since her death.

Well, "Wonder Boys" did a much better job of dealing with a has-been professor with a life's work that's gathering cobwebs and a former student who's ready to jump in bed with him. Coincidentally, that film was also set in Pittsburgh. Here, Quaid plays Prof. Lawrence Wetherhold, who can remember everything about Victorian novels but can't recall the names of students who have taken several classes with him. Into his life comes erstwhile brother Chuck, who has a history of looking to his overly serious brother for money. But his timing is perfect this trip. The professor, who arrogantly parks across two spaces, gets his car towed and another former student won't let him in the impound lot to fetch it. While climbing over the fence to get it himself, the professor takes a tumble and ends up in the emergency room where another former student is the attending physician. And another doctor is whispering to her in the hallway some snide remark about the professor not remembering her. Uh, excuse me, but the guy just came in with a head trauma, and she would have been his student like ten years ago! That's not the same thing as being unable to remember a student you had in another class. It's during moments like these where Poirer really belabors the point and defies logic in the process. It's hard, too, to fathom how or why Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker) goes from distain to dis guy's for me, or why she fakes an emergency call to get away from him when we're still trying to figure out why she wanted to be with him. Curious stuff, and none of it's convincing. And what is it about former students everywhere? Isn't Pittsburgh a big place?

Anyway, the timing is right for Chuck, because his brother's head trauma triggered a seizure, and he can't drive for six months and needs a chauffeur. You'd think that more would develop from that situation, but it doesn't. Instead, Chuck tries to bond with young Vanessa (Page, who's not nearly as perky here as she was in "Juno"). And bonding for a black sheep means getting the underage girl to smoke pot with him and taking her to a bar and buying a pitcher to share with her, then making a trip to Goodwill together. When you outline the narrative arc for any of the characters you begin to see how undernourished the plot and subplots are. The boy who's in college is off-camera for so many scenes that we even forget he's a student at the same university where his father teaches. So Unc hangs out with his niece, the son does his thing off-camera, and the main plot involves the professor's attempts to get back into the dating game with his doctor. Unfortunately, we saw more "opposites attract" energy from Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in "Something's Gotta Give" than we do here. None of the situations or plotlines seem to go far enough, and with performances that also seem restrained, you walk away from this film thinking that it had the potential to be much more interesting and witty than it was. And the really clever moments just make you realize there aren't enough of them to go around. Here's an example:

"You gave me a C," Dr. Hartigan tells the professor. "You said it was 'sophomoric.' I was a freshman."

"That's not what 'sophomoric' means," the professor says, and is then reminded that he wrote on her paper all those years ago, "Rambles like a bad folk song."

In another scene, a student comes to his office at five minutes to five and the professor reaches up when the student's not looking and moves the minute hand until it's past the hour, then snippily tells the lad his office hours are over and leaves the building. In still another fun moment, when Vanessa's uncle lights up a joint and offers it to her, she deadpans, "Great, now I'm in an Afterschool Special."

You almost ache for there to be more killer lines like that, and yet "Smart People" is still entertaining because the characters at least seem real. Poirer's father was a professor and he says on one of the bonus features that he's had these characters rattling around his head for most of his life. I believe him. I've spent the last 20 years as a professor and eight years before that as a grad student. I've run across people like this, but "Wonder Boys" does a far better job of capturing the academic life and having fun in the process.

Video:
The DVD of "Smart People" was listed at 2.35:1 aspect ratio, while the Blu-ray box says it's 2.40:1. Frankly, I didn't notice the difference, but then again I didn't have two HD TVs side by side and the luxury of making that comparison. I will say this, though. When the menu screen comes on, it's so color-soaked and razor-sharp that you think, wow. But there are no "wow" moments in the movie itself, which I attribute to the source materials and directorial choices. As with the DVD, there's a little grain throughout, though the edges are more precise. The colors, while not as eye-popping as that menu screen, at least look natural, though on occasion the skin tones lean in the direction of spray-tan orange. Overall, though, the 1080p picture (AVC/MPEG-4 codec) looks good, and because there are no visible compression artifacts and the transfer seems fine, you have to believe that this is as good as "Smart People" is going to look.

Audio:
Since this is such a low-key film with such a low-key audio--mostly talk--it's tough to tell how good the English PCM 5.1 uncompressed (48kHz/24-bit) sound is, because it never ratchets up. It's not a terribly dynamic soundtrack, and the rear speakers don't really get involved all that much. In the hospital and bar scenes there's more ambient noise and more channels get used, but for the most part it's straight dialogue and a lot of front- and center-speaker action. The bass is a little soft, and the treble isn't as bright as it could be. Which is to say that while the audio is compatible with the video and the tone of the film, it doesn't jump off the bat like a home run ball.

Extras:
Bottom line: The Blu-ray has the same bonus features as the DVD, with no Blu-ray exclusives.

Big-screen lovers will appreciate a coupon good for a free movie ticket to see "Blindness" from 8-12 through 10-31, and if you thought the actors were all a little less animated than you might have hoped for there's a fun little gag reel that shows them uncorking a bit of that pent-up energy. It kind of makes you wonder if these talented folks would have been given freer rein to ad lib if it wouldn't have imparted a little more energy into the film.

Also included is a 16-minute rundown on the project and individual characters, with the writer, director, and appropriate cast member talking about each character. No great revelations here. Of the nine deleted scenes, several make you wonder why they didn't make the cut. The only other bonus feature is the full-length commentary by Murro and Poirer, which is full of the pair's droll sense of humor. Interspersed between mundane comments ("Here's Dennis in the hospital") and gushing remarks about how fortunate they were to get the stars they did are a few revealing comments. They deliberately cast Quaid against type (though you have to wonder what might have resulted if they had let him slip in a few of his "type" gestures or inclinations). Same with Sarah Jessica Parker, whom they said they deliberately tried to "strip" so that the public wouldn't recognize a single shred of Carrie ("Sex and the City") Bradshaw. Makes you wonder, again, what would have happened if they had let a little Sarah Jessica shine through. When you compare it to another "meet the family" flick, "The Family Stone," which also had an erstwhile brother and a "good" one, it just ultimately lacks a little something. Heart, maybe.

Bottom Line:
Perhaps I expected too much, but as I said, "Wonder Boys" does a better job of spoofing the academic life. You also get the feeling that as entertaining as this film may be, it stops short too many times when what might have developed had the pen kept writing, the stars kept acting or improvising, and the cameras kept rolling may have been more interesting than the tightly edited film that we get.