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WONDER BOYS
Movie Review
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In Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas plays an imminent has-been who looks like someone who couldn't get even a dime out of Catherine Zeta-Jones if he were a panhandler on the street.
Yet this is definitely to the movie's advantage, because the role is exactly as portrayed in Michael Chabon's novel: a seedy stoner/academic with a broken-down car - and a writer's-block-induced breakdown in the 2,000-page novel he has been typing for years in the fading glow of a long-ago literary award.
This doesn't immediately sound like the kind of story Curtis Hanson would be directing right after L.A. Confidential - or, for that matter, after a career devoted almost exclusively to mystery and suspense.
It's easy, nevertheless, to feel some low-key affection (though hardly unbridled enthusiasm) for this brainy comedy. With an authentic-feeling collegiate backdrop, it puts a well-balanced cast of older and younger actors through amusing catastrophes and humiliations.
For plot-motivating questions, try these:
Will wife-abandoned Douglas wed the school chancellor (Frances McDormand) he's gotten
pregnant?
Will his talented but eccentric writing student (Tobey Maguire) co-opt the literary
attentions of a New York editor (Robert Downey Jr.) attending their Pennsylvania school's
weekend writing festival?
Will Douglas have a fling with his young writing student/tenant (Katie Holmes)?
Will Downey concede that his girlfriend-in-tow is a transvestite and, later, manage to
sleep with Maguire?
Will Maguire return the Marilyn Monroe jacket (worn at her wedding to Joe DiMaggio) he has
stolen from the baseball memorabilia stash of McDormand's husband?
Without even addressing the blind pet dog that Maguire fatally shoots in McDormand's
bedroom, this is a lot of material - though the book had even more before screenwriter
Steven Kloves made some trims that probably were wise. But because the story dynamics have
been altered a bit to emphasize the Douglas-Maguire relationship, other characters
(notably the women) get short shrift.
What we're left with is a lot of mood, a fair amount of drollery and the pleasures of
seeing an unkempt Douglas letting it all hang out as a once promising talent who seems to
have lost it.
The movie's mood is in its visual settings: slushy streets, campus saloons and aged
college-town houses that offer a lot of space for the money.
The drollery, which was a hallmark of the book as well,
has gotten a booster shot from Kloves - best known for having written and directed The
Fabulous Baker Boys.
In fact, with its nipping wit and sub-themes of faded glory, Wonder Boys seems more linked
to Baker Boys than to any movie in director Hanson's filmography.
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