Column:

‘Smart People’ is anything but

By Dan Moore

Published April 18, 2008

I’m not normally one for the lazy movie review trope of title punning, but “Smart People,” in all its smug glory, is asking for it. With that in mind, I’ve put together three such puns that accurately describe my feelings toward this film. Read through this review, then end it with whichever one you’d like, in your best Gene Shalit voice. They are: “Smart People” will duck into “Leatherheads” halfway through, “Smart” peopled with unwatchable jackasses, and, when bad things happen to “Smart People.”

“Smart People” sounds like the title of the inevitable “Scary Movie” take on the “Little Miss Sunshine”-inspired cycle of increasingly stultified pseudo-intellectual comedies, the ones that depend on stilted dialogue, forced quirk and quivering acoustic guitars. It looks like a parody, too: characters stare into space constantly in lieu of actually being characterized, they have absurd conversations about banal things and they do things nobody would really do. Here is the thing: It is not a parody. “Smart People” is at the bottom of the wannabe highbrow barrel, and to watch it is to understand that the harder a movie tries, the more it can fail.

“Smart People,” which is not nearly ironic enough a title for this collection of self-obsessed pedants, is about a misanthropic professor (Dennis Quaid) whose disconnection with other people has heightened since his wife’s death, and the doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker) who is, for some reason, determined to open him up. Their romance is founded on the worst kind of film coincidences, and worse than that there is absolutely no spark between Quaid and Parker. These characters seem to have nothing in common, aside from the fact that nobody in their right mind would want to spend any time around them. But “Smart People,” like the laziest romantic comedies, treats their fundamental rightness together as something to be taken for granted.

As if that weren’t enough, all of the periphery characters — the fun-loving uncle, the repressed young Republican who needs to loosen up, the angry son who doesn’t fit in — can be described completely, as I have done, in mere phrases, and aside from what will undoubtedly win the Golden Globe for most inexplicable incest subplot of 2008 the movie doesn’t do anything new with any of them. They’re all dropped into the film and allowed to run their dated courses.

What does the most damage, though, is the movie’s insufferable tone. It has less depth and actual human interaction than your average Adam Sandler movie; it proceeds through its rote plot machinations with proclamation after shrill proclamation of its, and its audience’s, superior intelligence. It seems to think character development, untelegraphed developments and interesting filmmaking are irrelevant when it can instead establish its characters’ superiority by setting them all on acoustic guitar, Bill-Murray-stare autopilot. The end result is that all of our flawed protagonists are both unlikable and uninteresting, possessing neither redeeming qualities nor intriguing vices.