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WONDER BOYS
Movie Review
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Do you love literature? Do you get off on such writerly esoterica as the difference in nuance between, say, the word "episode" and the word "spell"? Does the concept of publish-or-perish send a frisson of recognition up your kyphotic spine, bent double from too many hours under the reading lamp or hunched over the keyboard? Do you even know what the words "frisson" and "kyphotic" mean?
If so, then have I got a movie for you! (Actually, if this is you, you probably don't get out to the movies much, seeing as how the products of Hollywood are inevitably debasements of the fine art of storytelling, right?)
Wrong. "Wonder Boys," the new film by director Curtis ("L.A. Confidential") Hanson and writer Steve ("The Fabulous Baker Boys") Kloves and faithfully based on Michael Chabon's comic novel about the wacky world of writers, editors and academicians, somehow manages to make sexy and wry the rarefied milieu of the ivory tower and the typewriter. (That's right, they don't use WordPerfect here, for reasons that will become apparent only during the film's tragically burlesque climax.)
Set during a collegiate literary symposium called, appropriately enough, Wordfest, "Wonder Boys" is the story of one Grady Tripp, writing teacher, author and professional procrastinator. As marvelously played by an unshaven Michael Douglas…from behind a pair of bookish reading glasses and beneath 25 pounds of extra fat wrapped in a lucky pink bathrobe – Tripp is currently hard at work on the follow-up to his acclaimed first novel, The Arsonist's Daughter."
Truth be told, he's not that hard at work on anything. A victim of writer's block or sophomore slump, Grady has allowed the bloated manuscript to balloon to more than 2,600 pages (2,611, to be precise) and there's no end in sight. He's also managed to find time to impregnate Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), the chancellor of the college where he works and, as it happens, the wife of the English department chairman (Richard Thomas). To make matters worse, Grady's own spouse (his third) has left him even as the good professor is starting to develop a Messiah complex over James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a suicidal undergrad and literary wunderkind who is taking one of Grady's classes. In a fit of overprotectiveness, James has just shot the Gaskells' dog, Poe, in order to keep the beast from biting Grady's foot off during a cocktail party.
In the peripatetic plot, James and his mentor meander on and off campus smoking marijuana, eating powdered doughnuts and carting around the dead animal in the trunk of a 1966 maroon Ford Galaxy with black interior (this will become important later), while trying to dance around Grady's sexually ambiguous editor (Robert Downey Jr.), in town to check on the status of Grady's novel and to seduce impressionable aspiring writers. In short, Grady's doing everything except what Grady really needs to do, which is make things right with Sara and finish the damn book.
Each of the characters here is wonderfully drawn, particularly James, a morose savant whose deadpan personality seems tailor-made for Maguire's brand of sly, subtle humor. What saves the film from going slack – after all, pathological avoidance of commitment and resolution isn't much of a plot engine, now is it? – is the implied tension that arises between Grady and his protege, in whose green backpack happens to lie a couple hundred pages of what just might be the next Great American Novel. What are we expected to think when we have a blocked and desperate writer thrown together with a suicidal student who's carrying around a loaded gun and a manuscript that nobody knows he's written?
Wisely and deftly, "Wonder Boys" sidesteps that obvious denouement, but instead settles on another ending that, for a film with such literary credentials, feels disappointingly . . . cinematic.
Literature, it has been said, imposes an artificial order on the chaos of existence. Frankly, that very chaos is often what's most thrilling about the sloppy, unruly mess we call life. Up until just about the last minute, "Wonder Boys" celebrates that turbulent jumble, and isn't it infinitely more entertaining to watch someone who just can't keep it together than someone who can?
Copyright © Washington Post
