There is a long-running debate that the funniest comedies are harder to do than the most serious dramas. I'm not sure about that, but Charlie Chaplin taught us that the biggest laughs can come from the most familiar real-life situations, and there isn't a more hittable target than the real-life concept of fighting families forced to interact together. The comedic coming-of-age tale is a genre most often thought of in the same breath as teenage-centric John Hughes films. In "Smart People," a coming-of-age tale for social-challenged adults, the genre gets a delectable update from the high school cafeteria to the mid-life crisis set as a self-absorbed academic genius goes into middle-aged crisis mode, gets his much-needed comeuppance and tries to find a place alongside all the dumb people.
That might sound a bit harsh for a springtime offering, and the characters are not all that endearing, but that is the point of the film. The title is ironic, get it? It centers around the idea that intellectual and social intelligence do not go hand-in-hand and a lot of the pleasures come from seeing the so-called smart people of the title attempting to understand each other and falling on their faces. The characters here are capable of change, but the thought hasn't occurred to them. All of them need a little push in the right direction.
It gets a lot of things right until it stumbles a bit in the home stretch, but it hits all the right notes and the laughs come tumbling out in all the right places. First-time director Noam Murro aims high and gets career-transforming performances from a terrific cast of actors in roles tailor-made for them. This is a film that is so good and true-to-life that, in spite of its shortcomings, is the perfect antidote for those tired of the dumb comedies that seem to be populating theaters at the moment.
The first scenes occur on the college campus of Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh as burnt-out English professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) drags himself from class to class. He is self-absorbed, demanding, contemptuous of his students, and uses the log-ago death of his spouse as a green light to be as miserable as possible. There is an authentic feel to the college scenes that feel true not because it focuses on academics or student/teacher relationships, but because it captures the feeling that some professors remain trapped in a state of permanent college-age adolescence for decades.
The household situation isn't much brighter. There is the older college-aged son, a soon-to-be published poet, but since he hates his father and resents him for being a crap dad, the father/daughter relationship gets most of the attention. The prof has turned his teenaged daughter (Ellen Page), a conceited, super-responsible Republican-in-training, into a miniature model of dad. "You're not happy either," she tells him in her most telling scene, "and you're my role model." There are some decided rough edges to her character that Mark Jude Poirier's script - and Page - aren't afraid to highlight. She doesn't seem to mind her father's self-absorption though, and as she tells him at one point, "self-absorption is underrated."
The plot gets into high gear once the professor suffers a head trauma, the result of his pig-headed stubbornness, and he meets chief ER doctor Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former student. He has a telling fault of not remembering the names of his students and he doesn't remember her either. It turns out Janet nursed a schoolgirl crush on him as a college freshman and all she got for her efforts is a disparaging comment on her paper.