Smart People

We're back at the movies this week with "Smart People," a likeable little comedy set in the concrete groves of academe (Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh).

Poor old Professor Wetherhold. He's a widower who still keeps his late wife's clothes in the closet. He suffered a seizure, which means he can't drive for several months. His brilliant high school daughter is turning into a depressed mini-version of him. No one wants to publish his latest book. And his ne'er-do-well brother has suddenly dropped in to stay for a while.

You'd feel sorry for the guy if only he weren't such a jerk. You know that the first time you see him parking his car across two spaces. In fact, he does it twice. As played by Dennis Quaid, he's a pompous, pot-bellied intellectual snob, who can't hear a student's opinion without belittling it and the student.


Clearly, he's due for some humanizing, and who better to administer it than his adoptive brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church, from "Sideways"), and the attractive Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), who never forgave ol' Wetherhold for giving her a C back in her freshman year. (For reasons known only to her, she still hangs on to that English paper she wrote for him.)


The fourth person in this character-driven tale is Wetherhold's daughter Vanessa, played by the appealing Ellen Page as a conservative Juno, still ready with a smart-ass quip, only with a Reagan poster on the wall. Unlike Juno, however, Vanessa doesn't have any friends -- that is, until Uncle Chuck arrives on the scene with some reefer and a pitcher of beer. He's not out to corrupt her, just loosen her up a little.

Complications, as they say, ensue.


I won't give away much more of the plot here -- you've probably figured out that the comely Dr. Hartigan will find something to salvage in the wreckage of Wetherhold. You may wonder why she bothers, but you'll still find some things to laugh at along the way.


"Smart People" was directed by a newcomer named Noam Murro, whose prior work seems to consist of TV commercials. It's not a laugh riot, but with summer movies on the way in, it offers a human-scale story with some clever lines. You could do a lot worse.