WONDER BOYS (Paramount) Starring: Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr., Katie Holmes. Screenplay: Steve Kloves, based on the novel by Michael Chabon. Producers: Scott Rudin and Curtis Hanson. Director: Curtis Hanson. MPAA Rating: R (drug use, profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 107 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Wildly flawed though it may be, WONDER BOYS has one thing going for it you just can't take away: a dead dog. Call me a sick puppy if you must -- in a cinematic environment where you can litter a landscape with human corpses but God forbid the plucky pooch doesn't make it to the final reel intact, it's refreshing to find a film with the nerve to off Fido. You learn something about a film-maker's willingness to take you somewhere different via these small touches, and they're the kind of small touches WONDER BOYS sends spilling all over the screen. An inexperienced police officer leaves his squad car in neutral and watches it begin rolling down the street. A dead ringer for James Brown chases our protagonist's car, jumping butt-first onto the hood. A pregnant waitress named Oola wears a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe on the day of her wedding to Joe DiMaggio. And so on.
If there had been something more cohesive at the center of WONDER BOYS, it could have been one of those minor classics of tics and quirks like THE FRESHMAN. Instead, it's a rambling, shambling, often endearing mess of a movie about a Pittsburgh English professor named Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas). The author of a much-praised novel, Tripp has spent seven years working on the epic follow-up, going through nearly as many wives as reams of paper in the process. As the university begins its annual literary conference, Tripp contends with plenty of troubles. His latest wife has just left him, his long-time lover and university chancellor Sara (Frances McDormand) is pregnant with his child and his agent Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) is pressuring him for the novel. On top of it all, Tripp has to play chaperone to James Leer (Tobey Maguire), Tripp's most gifted writing student but also his most messed-up.
The aforementioned oddball touches probably give you a good sense for WONDER BOYS' unconventional tone, but the film's unconventionality actually goes a bit beyond that. Director Curtis Hanson (L.A. CONFIDENTIAL) and screenwriter Steve Kloves (AWOL from the big screen since FLESH AND BONE in 1993) give the story a pacing that can best be described as unhurried. It's almost as though the filmmakers treat everything as though it's seen through the eyes of Tripp, whose fondness for the ganja cannot be overstated. Douglas, who has never been shy about taking on characters with an unpleasant side, gives a good-natured performance as a guy who becomes ever-more-dilapidated over the course of the film. It's an odd sort of comedy that's based on watching a man fall apart while he slowly figures out he needs to pull himself together.
All those moments in such a leisurely, unpretentious package should have added up to first-class fun, but somehow WONDER BOYS never quite gets there. More to the point, it doesn't leave you with the impression that first-class fun was the object in the first place. The story keeps flitting back to Tripp's indecision regarding whether to attempt a reconciliation with his wife or commit to Sara, eventually reaching a resolution that involves Tripp's final choice. Suddenly you're left with the sensation that WONDER BOYS was really about a 50-year-old adolescent just learning how to grow up, which leaves you wondering why development of Tripp's character was so haphazzard. It's one thing to enjoy a casual story about the exploits of a casual character. It's a bit more frustrating when you realize something serious was supposed to come out of it.
It's particularly frustrating when nothing about the first 90 minutes of the film suggests any of the characters were meant to be taken seriously. That's not to say it's not enjoyable to spend time with them; Downey, McDormand and Maguire all craft convincing characters. There's just not enough weight to WONDER BOYS for it to support a moral to the story. The relationship between Tripp and Leer is resolved to abruptly, the relationship between Tripp and his affectionate student tenant (Katie Holmes) isn't developed at all and the Tripp/Sara connection always feels too nebulous for its ultimate resolution to matter. It's possible to spend most of WONDER BOYS grinning at its nonchalance, its goofiness and its small pleasures. Once you reach the end, you may be wishing that a film with the nerve to kill the dog also had the nerve to resist the tidy happily-ever-after of the man who learns What Really Matters.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 small wonders: 6.
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