Wonder Boys (***1/2 out of ****) Starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire Directed By Curtis Hanson Paramount Pictures, Rated R, 2000 Running Time: 1 Hour 55 Minutes
By Sean Molloy
[LIGHT SPOILERS]
This is the kind of film that hits close to home. Not because I've ever hobnobbed with literary greats, not because I've ever had best-selling novelists for friends and college professors, not because I've ever killed a man's dog and carried it around in my trunk for the weekend. Even though I've never met any of the characters in director Curtis Hanson's latest film Wonder Boys, I feel like I know them all. Some folks would call them quirky - I call them real. Their lives seem honest and true, and there's a wealth I can find in common with what these people do, say, think, and feel.
Curtis Hanson's last picture, the brilliant L.A. Confidential, was a stylish modern film noir which struck a powerful mood and was largely story-o-centric. Wonder Boys is a sudden shift in gears for Hanson, as it's quiet, funny and bittersweet, concerned mainly (and wisely) with its people rather than its plot.
Michael Douglas plays English professor Grady Tripp in what is easily one of his best performances. Even a self-proclaimed Michael Douglas hater among our film-going group whole-heartedly agreed, adding that for once he wasn't playing someone rich, unhappy, or both. Grady teaches writing to a class full of would- be novelists and editors. He tells them to focus, instructs them find their voice, implores them to know their goals... then he returns to his cluttered home to smoke some weed and work on his 2611-page second novel, seven years in the making, which he hasn't got a clue how to end.
Grady has been through two marriages, and the third is about to end. We never see his wife, we only hear about her and guess that she was probably right to step out on this man that's never really given her a second thought. A fourth relationship - this one with Sara, the chancellor of the university he teaches at (played by Fargo's most excellent Frances McDormand) - is already underway and has been for a while, and we sense that Grady's attention will doubtlessly wander away from her before too long as well.
So when it seems as if Grady is going to take a troubled and brilliant student named James (Tobey Maguire, one of my favorite actors these days) under his wing, it comes as no surprise that he chooses to pass him off as someone else's problem when he become too bothersome. Grady Tripp is a guy who can't practice what he preaches - he can't find his focus, he has no idea what his own goals are. He calls James a wonder boy, but we know that Grady is exactly the same, someone who's just been plodding along in his life, someone who still needs to find himself and, inevitably, grow up. "You teach us that writers need to make choices," one of his students (Katie Holmes) tells him after reading an overwhelmingly detailed section of his latest novel. "It reads like you didn't make any."
We know from the get-go that by the end, Grady is going to figure out his life... or at least figure out how to figure it out - but what makes Wonder Boys special is the journey there. None of the characters are drawn in broad, stereotypical strokes - they all have refreshingly real, complex feelings, both sexual and philosophical. It would have been easy to make Grady's editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) your standard Hollywood gay man - instead, Terry is a drawn as a guy who's completely comfortable with the fact that he doesn't understand whatever the hell it is that drives him. Tobey Maguire's James cries when jackets look too lonely. He carries a gun and is a brooding and compulsive liar, not because of some past trauma or horrible childhood, but because he chooses to be that way... he likes it in the dark.
Wonder Boys reminds me of a less goofball version of Rushmore, a great and mostly overlooked movie that came out about a year ago. Aside from being in part about teacher/student relationships, both films are about characters who are struggling to grow up, realizing they were fighting the battle only once it was finished. Both feature peak performances from stars that a lot of folks believed were past their prime - Bill Murray in Rushmore, Douglas in Wonder Boys. Both fill the role of the requisite "coulda-been-a-contender" February movie released just after the announcement of the Oscar nominations - too late to be considered for this year, too early to be remembered next year.
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