Smart People (Theatre) - Jennie

Noam Murro hasn’t directed before, Mark Poirer hasn’t written any other film – according to IMDB this film is the fledgling ship for both of these artists. So, why does this film feel so familiar? In the landscape of Hollywood today most films can be categorized pretty easily: big budget blockbuster, chick flick, raunchy comedy, and charming “indie” just to name a few. This falls so squarely in the latter’s category that I know I have watched this film before. The struggling college professor who must raise his children despite having no clue how to, the hip child who doesn’t know how hip she is, and the icing on this cake of déjà vu – Thomas Haden Church playing an overgrown child who bares his ass for laughs. Didn’t he play this same exact character in Sideways sans the middle school mustache? Despite this being a fairly entertaining film I found myself disappointed by its lack of flavor. I laughed at most of Church’s Man-Child antics, Dennis Quaid sold me on his beleaguered father shtick, hell, even Ellen Page’s rightwing incestuous student seemed fleshed out and real. I’m not sure what I was expecting. This was exactly the film anyone could have guessed would come out of this premise, but for a first film, how can this seem so rehashed?
I also have problems with the idea that all professors of English are depressed while maintaining a delightfully introspective hermit quality. Examples abound: The Squid and the Whale (2005), Wonder Boys (2000), even Sideways (2004) contained an English teacher who couldn’t get his career off the ground. This theme runs rampant in literature as well – John Irving comes to mind. Were all our English professors in college mollycoddled sourpusses? Mine certainly wasn’t. Though, as I think about it now I can understand the impetuous for such characters. I don’t know many English majors who focus on writing and want to become English teachers. No, they want to become writers. Thus becoming a teacher is settling, and writing about how they settled is more interesting than anything else that has happened in their life thus far. Well, I guess I changed my mind. But I still have a problem with it. Can these people only write about their life experiences?
Anyways, back to the film (warning: big spoiler here), the end completely pissed me off. For some odd reason they had Dennis Quaid impregnate Sarah Jessica Parker’s character – this was an annoying plot device in the first place. The two wanted to work with this development and so they get back together in the closing seconds of the film… uh… yeah. The most confusing and thus annoying thing about this was they showed shots of Quaid happily handling a child in the closing credit – ok. But, then, in the last shot they showed him cradling two children, one a baby girl, one a baby boy… she had twins! Yup, after a relatively well written albeit unoriginal film they end with a sitcom quality twist, maybe in real life that is what happened and as we all know English professor can’t write about anything but what they know.

6 out of 10: a humorous film for those that enjoy beards, butts, and books though it was bleakly bland.