‘Smart People’ isn’t Baumbach, but still worth your time

If, as you settle into your seat at a Smart People matinee, you dream of the next coming of dysfunctional-intellectual family specialist Noah Baumbach, your hopes will be dashed by the very first scene, in which our curmudgeonly hero, Victorian literature professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), parks diagonally across two parking spaces. An absent-minded professor? In a debut drama from a director of commercials? You don’t say.

Smart People, however, is much better than its inauspicious opening and other assorted clichés would suggest. Most of this is due to the acting—Dennis Quaid is a downright lovable jerk; Ellen Page plays Juno again, exquisitely—but novelist Mark Jude Poirier’s writing turns sharp, surprising corners, and Noam Murro’s direction is patient, giving the material plenty of room to sprout out of its ruts.

Lawrence Wetherhold is a widower, and his wife’s death has scarred the entire family. His teenage daughter (Ellen Page) cooks meals for the family nightly, a task wedged amid a grueling schedule that also includes studying for the SATs and pamphleteering on behalf of the Young Republicans (what is it about Page that makes filmmakers feel she’s a natural champion for the unborn?). Lawrence’s son (Ashton Holmes) is a nobody toiling away meekly at Carnegie-Mellon, where his father teaches. And Lawrence himself is a grumpy, pot-bellied blowhard who refuses to get rid of his wife’s clothes.

Into this sour household comes Lawrence’s deadbeat adopted brother (Thomas Haden Church), with his penchant for pot and beer and being courteous, and a beautiful ER doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker), who is both attracted to and repelled by Lawrence’s jagged personality. All the collisions occur pretty much as you’d expect, but they bounce off in unexpected directions. Smart People isn’t reliably smart (even the most preternaturally talented college students don’t get their first poems published in The New Yorker), but it is extremely funny and sweet.

SMART PEOPLE DIR. NOAM MURRO | RATED R | OPENS FRI EVERYWHERE

Tags: dennis quaid, ellen page, Film, smart people