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WONDER BOYS
Movie Review
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Campus movies are irresistible -- whether it's Joshua Logan's "Tall Story" (1960), in which a young Jane Fonda blows up the chemistry lab while pursuing Tony Perkins, or James Bridges' "The Paper Chase" (1973), which pitted a tousle-haired Timothy Bottoms against imperious professor John Houseman.
Curtis Hanson's "Wonder Boys," the filmmaker's first film since his triumphant L.A. Confidential (1997), is the latest addition to this rarified subgenre -- and it is a welcome addition, with Michael Douglas in a blazing comic performance as one of those eternal students who never left the campus.
Unshaven and his hair long and unkempt, with horn-rimmed eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose, Douglas looks like a mad, romantic anarchist as he strides directionless around his school's grounds. He could be playing Bottoms' character from "The Paper Chase" -- only about 30 years later.
Douglas is Grady Tripp, a respected scholar who, at 50, has gone to seed. The star literature-and-writing professor at his unnamed Pittsburgh university ("Wonder Boys" was filmed on the grounds of Carnegie-Mellon University), Grady is a former zealot who has lost his way and most of his passion. But he nevertheless remains an inspiration to his students, who probably are in awe of the specific kind of tweedy bohemia he represents. Hanson's film is about one catastrophic weekend in Grady's life in which the man doesn't so much experience a midlife crisis as he finally comes of age -- belatedly.
On this particular weekend, Grady is supposed to oversee WordFest, his university's annual literary festival, where he is supposed to act both social and successful, and he's also supposed to deliver the manuscript of his long-awaited second novel to his editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), who has come to WordFest to also scout new talent. But Grady's book isn't finished. He's on page 2,166, and the thing seems to refuse to end.
On the morning before WordFest, Grady's latest wife up and leaves him. "Wives have left me before," he shrugs in the film's narration, but this is the first of many problems that will gang up on him. There's Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), the school chancellor who is Grady's mistress and who is married to the man who heads Grady's department, Walter Gaskell (Richard Thomas). Sara has news for Grady, which she drops on him at the party she and her husband are hosting to kick off WordFest. She's pregnant.
It's at this moment that the randy Terry shows up, fresh from the airport with a cross-dresser -- Antonia Sloviak (newcomer Michael Cavadias) -- he picked up on the plane. Sara sniffs the air around Miss Sloviak (as she is called in the film) and comments, "Hmmm, I wear the same perfume that a transvestite wears." And then Grady's most brilliant student shows up -- James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a self-consciously dour kid who applies his writer's imagination to his own life. James is a fabulist who comes up with the most outrageous stories about himself. Tonight, he's carrying a gun, along with a story to go with it. He ends up shooting the beloved dog of Sara's husband.
The movie, adapted from Michael Chabon's novel by sometime director Steve Kloves ("The Fabulous Baker Boys"), is about the notion of Wonder Boys -- or, if you'd rather, Golden Boys -- at different stages of life. Grady is Wonder Boy Past, Terry is Wonder Boy Present and James is Wonder Boy Future, and these three spend a lost weekend together carousing and drinking and mostly smoking pot, each getting a chance to see their lives at those different stages.
Rip Torn signs in for a few scenes as a celebrated writer named Q, one of the key speakers at WordFest, and Katie Holmes plays Hannah Green, another gifted student who rents a room in Grady's messy, rambling old Victorian house on campus. He likes to say that Hannah is "a junkie for the printed word." And she is. She reads Grady's book -- all 2,166 pages of it -- and, switching roles with him, tells Grady that it doesn't work because he "didn't make choices."
Holmes' subtle depiction of an intelligent young woman with a crush on an older man is no male fantasy but smacks of the real thing. Another refreshingly grown-up touch about the film is that Grady and the ever-patient Sara, as played by Douglas and McDormand, are equals in terms of their ages -- a giant step forward for Hollywood, considering that Douglas' last leading lady was Gwyneth Paltrow. And Downey plays his character's sexual ambiguity in such a low-keyed way that we hardly notice it.
Hanson adds to the leftover-'70s atmosphere of his unhinged film with vintage songs by Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, among others, including a terrific new song by Dylan called "Things Have Changed" that underlines the melancholy permeating what is essentially a screwball comedy.
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