PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 4/11/08)

An accumulation of meaningless family squabbles sutured together by what must be the most overwrought, intrusive score ever, Smart People should have hired a few. First off, to explain to its first-time director Noam Murro how movies are supposed to flow—with music used sparingly to heighten or underline dramatic import, not as a loud transitional device to be plopped down between every single scene as on an episode of Friends. Once he'd mastered that, Murro could have moved on to concepts such as character establishment: learning, for example,  that once your main character has been identified as a professor of literature he need not walk by his bookcase and hold up a copy of William Carlos Williams to remind the audience of his erudition. Similarly, a politically conservative high-school girl doesn't need to have an actual picture of Ronald Reagan hanging prominently on her wall to sell her Republican cred, nor does any character played by Thomas Haden Church have to be introduced copying his butt on a copy machine to let us know he's going to be a feckless boob. Learn to trust your audience a little, Murro.

Dennis Quaid is mostly lost at sea as Lawrence Wetherhold, the Carnegie Mellon lit professor; he apparently saw fit to tinker with his performance as filming went along, greeting us in some scenes as a noticeably swishy highbrow, while at other moments he's channeling the smiling, drunken menace of Nicholson's Jack Torrance. In still other scenes he's just good ol' exhausted Quaid. His problems: the afore-mentioned boob, an adopted brother named Chuck who shows up needing a place to stay and offers to be the chauffeur Wetherhold requires for medical reasons; his colleagues at the university who dislike Wetherhold and want to block his appointment as chair of the English department; and Vanessa, the android-like daughter who takes the place of his deceased wife in egging him on to greater career advancement while not realizing that she creeps everyone out by not acting her age. Good casting there, with Ellen Page finding another opportunity to tweak her "inscrutable Canadian" persona, although after one awards season it's starting to wear thin.

Sarah Jessica Parker is also in this thing, as Janet, Wetherhold's doctor and love interest, who also happens to have once been his undergraduate student. Like most women in their mid-40s, she's obsessed with an unfair C she received on a paper on Bleak House back when she was a freshman and since Wetherhold gave it to her, that complicates his ability to give it to her now, so to speak. At one point, a pregnancy scare prompts her to reassure him that they will figure out a way through it because, pause for emphasis, "we're smart people." Do the filmmakers think they're satirizing an entire educated class, with Haden Church's character acting the part of the wise fool who sees through the intellectual pretensions of his adopted family? (He sits around smoking pot and watching Spanish television while they fritter about with their silly ambitions.) Are they attempting a dramedy about the stresses that accompany academic rigor or trying to take the naturally brainy down a peg? Are they implying that a life lived by those kind of strictures inevitably lands one inside Augusten Burroughs' house? It doesn't really matter, since ideas like these are far beyond the scope and ability of Mark Poirier's soapy, cue-a-minute script. Even if they weren't, the stringy, proudly generic score attacking the movie at every interval would have drowned them out anyway.

-- Ryan Stewart