A lugubrious dramedy about a rumpled American prof who needs a new lease on life, Smart People is Wonder Boys replayed at 16 rpm. The spark and wit that animated Curtis Hanson’s earlier film — also set in Pittsburgh, which is apparently America’s capital of midlife malaise — are sorely absent in this effort by novelist-turned-screenwriter Mark Poirier and director Noam Murro. In fact, it barely manages to make it to the level of Dan in Real Life, The Upside of Anger and other tediously milquetoast movies in which boring, middle-class white folks wonder what it’s all for.

The latest example of this woe-begotten subgenre is so unremittingly drab, even Ellen Page seems to be laboring under the effects of a heavy dosage of Zoloft. The Juno star plays the straitlaced daughter of Lawrence (Dennis Quaid), a cranky academic who doesn’t get any happier when events bring him together with his slacker brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) and Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), an ER doctor who inexplicably harbored a crush on Lawrence when she was his student. The fact that no great epiphanies come their way is mildly novel. Unfortunately, Poirier and Murro mistake inertia for subtlety. Disproving Tolstoy’s adage, this unhappy family is unhappy only in the least interesting ways.

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1