Wonder Boys (2000)
Talk about a Sophomore Slump - it's taken Grady Tripp seven years and over 2600 single-spaced pages, and he still doesn't have a second novel.
The first novel by Tripp (Michael Douglas) was "Arsonist's Daughter," supposedly the winner of the PEN Award. So the literary community eagerly awaits a new effort. Of course Grady's life as a writer in contemporary America almost demands that he be a college professor. Hence the setting in a fictional Pittsburgh university. Unfortunately, the film gets many aspects of college life wrong. I can understand novelist Michael Chabon and screenwriter Steven Kloves sketching a fiction writing workshop in which the students are petty and personal. But the ones I've been through have always had a camaraderie and atmosphere of willingness to help: yes, there's a certain amount of ignorance of purpose, but never the pure vitriol heaped upon the person and talent of James Leer, played by Tobey Maguire. And in a forum of open critiquing of stories, the professor doesn't have to call on students who raise their hands.
Still the world of writing commands our attention well. The inbred politics is also captured believably. It seems Grady's young wife has just this morning left him; not that it matters much, as the marriage has been tainted by Grady's affair with the Chancellor of the college where he teaches. Dr. Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand) is pregnant, and it's not with the child of her husband Walter (Richard Thomas), who is also the chair of the English department and Grady's boss. To add to the complications of academia, we see a gathering of writers and various hangers-on at the Gaskell household. There we also watch the development of more characters, among them Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), Grady's agent from New York, and Crabtree's transvestite pick-up Antonia/Tony. Add to this the fact that Walter Gaskell's blind mastiff hates Grady, growling and ultimately chomping on the hero's calf.
Director Curtis Hanson handles characterization swiftly with his solid cast. The film's opening and middle are stronger than its closing, due mainly to the situations - wacky and moving - into which the characters get themselves. We hear a good deal of one-liners that are so crazy they smack of reality. And we get a top-notch performance from Michael Douglas in the lead role.
Douglas has superior timing and a natural ease on the screen. His character operates, however, under the burden of stereotype: he's rumpled and 60-ish, and even though he's been living in his body and his life for a long time, he's yet to get it right. (Doesn't this sound like Donald Sullivan, Paul Newman's character in "Nobody's Fool"?) Still Douglas does a remarkable job in causing his character to be sympathetic, especially considering his character is not a very good role model for students: he drinks, smokes expensive marijuana, and often loses his tact in personal conversations. He also looks on as a student of his backslides into immorality and crime. Finally, he is beset by fainting spells that hit him at random times, making worse his status as a wounded man. Still, we like the guy, especially as he careens comically out of the safe orbit of the tenure-track.
Tobey Maguire is at his most inscrutable in "Wonder Boys." I've not seen him particularly excitable in a performance, but here he is low-key almost to a fault, his character a good writer but otherwise a morally reckless liar. Let's hope many more solid scripts come Maguire's way; apparently he is taking a hiatus currently, in a patient quest for quality.
Frances McDormand is good in everything she does. Here she is underutilized, though, as the chief executive of the college, and we do not get more than a glance of the husband whom she is betraying; we are supposed, I guess, to dislike Richard Thomas' character simply because he doesn't care for Grady.
The other female role is played by Katie Holmes. Her Hannah Green is also a star student of Grady's; we hear Grady tell another novelist, "Q" (Rip Torn) that Hannah has already published two stories in the "Paris Review." Enamored of Grady, she rents a room in his house and ends up giving him some metaphorically significant advice.
"Wonder Boys" has many faults - the random-feeling ending, the lack of consequences for reprehensible behaviors - that make it fall short of greatness. But it is definitely a good film. With a momentum built through Grady's inability to make decisions and through a few wacky twists of plot, the story finally shows that serious losses are sometimes necessary to keep one from taking life too seriously.
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