SMART PEOPLE *** Mixed couples.Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (teen drug and alcohol use, brief sexuality and partial nudity). At the Cinema 1, the Chelsea, the Angelika, others.
CALL the cops. Oscar nominees Ellen Page and Thomas Haden Church steal “Smart People” right from under the noses of its ostensible stars, Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid.
In my humble opinion, that’s not a bad thing. Page and Church work so brilliantly together as a comic team that it’s worth enduring the leads’ utter lack of chemistry together – not to mention the fact they’re both wildly miscast.
The versatile Quaid – for perhaps the first time in his long career – resorts to mugging (he also lowers his already low voice by an octave and sports a prosthetic belly) to play Lawrence Wetherhold, a widowed literature professor at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh.
Parker is scarcely more believable as Janet, an emergency room doctor. She and Lawrence meet cute after the professor suffers a concussion while climbing a fence to retrieve his car from the university’s impound lot.
Janet is a former student of the professor who once had a crush on him. Though he’s a rude misanthrope, she agrees to a date, which ends abruptly with Janet accurately describing Lawrence as a “pompous blowhard.”
For reasons best known to novelist-turned-screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier and director Noam Murro, a veteran of commercials, Janet continues playing doctor with the smug professor.
But enough about their uninteresting on-and-off romance, which follows an all-too-familiar arc, and the subplot about Lawrence’s son, a closet poet. The real reason to see “Smart People” is for Page, cast as Lawrence’s acerbic, overachieving teenage daughter, Vanessa – and Church, who plays Lawrence’s ne’er-do-well adopted brother, Chuck. For starters, they get all of the movie’s best zingers.
At first, Vanessa treats the underemployed Chuck – who has returned after a lengthy absence to serve as Lawrence’s none-too-reliable chauffeur – with the same intellectual disdain she dishes out to Janet (the diminutive Page blows Parker, who seems huge by comparison, off the screen in a hilarious Christmas dinner confrontation).
But free spirit Chuck, alarmed at his niece’s uptight demeanor and membership in the Young Republicans of Western Pennsylvania, decides to loosen her up – much as Janet is doing with his adopted brother.
When Vanessa responds by giving her uncle a drunken kiss with unforeseen consequences for both of them, it only confirms the dazzlers from “Juno” and “Sideways” are the real attraction in “Smart People.”