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WONDER BOYS
Movie Review
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"Wonder Boys" is a sweet screenful of quirky
chaos that gives Michael Douglas exactly the chance he's been looking for to lighten up
after playing a long string of dark characters. There's a lot more than eccentricity in
his middle-aged college lit prof, Grady Tripp, in a smartly faceted performance we've been
waiting years for Douglas to find. Grady has spent years writing but not finishing his
second novel for fear that it won't measure up to his first, on which his wonder-boy
reputation is based. Things start to happen when the aging wonder boy meets a fresh wonder
boy, Tobey Maguire's James, a gifted student with literary skills but no social skills,
and a knack for getting into trouble, partly because he lies a lot.
It's clear that Grady's comfortable days of cocooned coasting are about to end. For one
thing, the college's impending annual lit fest brings successful real-world novelists to
campus to stoke all the usual academic insecurities. For another, Grady's wife has left
him. For another, his affair with Frances McDormand's college chancellor has resulted in
her pregnancy, which means she has some decision making ahead of her, too, one being
whether to stay married to her husband, the English department chairman. Also, Grady's
anxious editor, Crabtree, drolly inscribed by Robert Downey Jr., arrives in hopes of
finally yanking the completed second novel from Grady's grasp while trying not to let on
how much career trouble he's facing unless he comes up with another hit - and fast.
To summarize, "Wonder Boys" is a film about everything going wrong in which
everything goes right. And we haven't even cited such secondary delights as Katie Holmes's
precocious student with a crush on Grady who has managed to work her way into his life by
renting a room in his house, or Rip Torn's amusingly over-hearty successful writer of
popular fiction nicknamed - as if he were the Tarantino of the book lists or one of James
Bond's colleagues - Q. Given the chance to embrace a character who by his own design is
loosely wrapped, Douglas plunges in with a relaxed zest that convinces you that he tapped
fondly into his own hippie student days. He neatly projects both a generous benevolence
toward and a feeling of being threatened by Maguire's James.
Coming off "The Cider House Rules" and "Ride With the Devil," this
film makes it three in a row for Maguire, who now must be recognized as the outstanding
20-something actor. He never overacts, seemingly having been born with the knack of making
the camera come to him, making us want to connect with something we're sure is inside him,
but isn't showing, at least not overtly. His role here gives him even more scope than the
usual ingenuous characters he plays. There is something devious in James. Like most people
we're convinced are talented writers, there's something of the observer in him. But
there's also a glint of something more, an impulsiveness you know he'd like to yield to if
he could bring himself to lower his guard. In all, an impressively subtle piece of work
that keeps you trying to peer beyond his character's armor.
But then the material throughout is so fresh and scatty and totally devoid of the usual
campus cliches that you don't know whether to applaud or sigh with relief. It's a funny,
touching follow-up to "L.A. Confidential" for director Curtis Hanson, and Steve
Kloves's screenplay from Michael Chabon's novel reminds you of the distinctiveness and
individuality that made Kloves's "The Fabulous Baker Boys" and "Flesh and
Bone" the standouts they were. I love the way this guy writes. "Wonder
Boys" is an altogether happy convergence of talents, including McDormand's
half-rueful, half-yearning chancellor, an academic to the manner born, but also a woman in
full, affecting contact with her heart in this lovely midwinter coming-of-age story where
it's the middle-aged prof who has the growing up to do.
Copyright © Boston Globe
