Movies Jonathan Richards, Santa Fe (NM) Reporter
FEED ME
WONDER BOYS Directed by Curtis Hanson Screenplay by Steve Kloves from the novel by Michael Chabon With Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire UA South R 112 min.
Like the insatiable plant in "Little Shop of Horrors," Grady Tripp's second novel sits by his old IBM Selectric typewriter demanding to be fed. And feed it he does. He's well into his third thousand manuscript pages (single spaced), and the end is no closer at hand than it ever was. Grady (Michael Douglas) has the opposite of writer's block. He can write. He just can't stop. Curtis Hanson's laconically-paced screwball comedy of letters (adapted from Michael Chabon's novel) covers a pivotal weekend in Grady's life at the western Pennsylvania university where he is a tenured professor of English. His young wife has just left him. His mistress (Frances McDormand), university chancellor and wife of his department chairman (Richard Thomas) has just told him she's pregnant. One of his students (Katie Holmes) rents a room in his house, but would like to get closer to the master bedroom. His editor (Robert Downey Jr) is in town, ostensibly for Wordfest, the college's annual book business symposium, but really to get his hands on the manuscript, which is now seven years overdue. His best creative writing student, James (Tobey Maguire), is a pathological liar and possibly suicidal depressive who carries a loaded pistol. It is not the best of times for Grady. This the first movie for Hanson since his hugely successful L.A. Confidential, and it shows his versatility (Hanson gets around stylistically; he also made The River Wild and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle). It's not entirely without violence - there's a bloody ankle, and more of the lethal indignities to dogs popularized by There's Something About Mary - but Hanson, working from a witty screenplay by Steve Kloves (writer/director of The Fabulous Baker Boys), shows an assurance with comedy that builds from character. The cast is terrific. Douglas gives Grady the wry, worn intelligence of a well-thumbed paperback on self-knowledge. Maguire, a seriously underestimated actor, shoots beams of sly wit through James's moody darkness. McDormand serves a crisp tossed salad of clear-eyed judgement and sympathetic patience. Rip Torn is memorable as a pompous author who turns out a book a year, and begins his keynote address to Wordfest intoning "I...am a writer." And Downey, as always, is brilliant. There's sex, drugs, and even a little rock 'n roll with a new Bob Dylan song, "Things Have Changed", on the soundtrack. There are plenty of laughs, and only a few aimless patches before the movie rounds into its home stretch. Then it lumbers through a series of endings that feel too calculated, trite, improbable, and self-consciously finishy - you can almost feel the blank sheet being rolled into the typewriter and the writer muttering "last page.." It's too bad, but it's not a deal-breaker. Wonder Boys is a lot better than a February move has any right to be.
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