I Wonder, Wonder...

Wonder Boys Dir: Curtis Hanson Starring Michael Douglas Toby Maguire Frances McDormand Robert Downey, Jr. 2000 R, 112 m RATING: 7 out of 10

COMPLUSIVE WRITERS: A shabby Michael Douglas attempts to help a habitual Toby Maguire find direction.

Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys begins as an unkempt Michael Douglas stumbles through his equally messy home, perfectly setting up his character.  He plays a once successful writer now turned college professor whose love life, professional life, and craft are falling apart while his editor comes to check on the book he's been writing for 5 years.  Enter Toby Maguire, one of his less than normal students, who becomes attatched to the seemingly washed up Douglas and editor (Robert Downey Jr.) Wonder Boys is full of great perfomances, but Tobey Maguire comes out ahead, hitting all the right notes with his touching, penisve turn as a student who trudges on writing regardless of derision from his peers. Douglas is also playfully aloof as the pot-smoking Professor Tripp, and turns in one of him most likeable performance in years.  Katie Holmes and Frances McDormand round out the fine cast, but again, it's Maguire who comes up with a breakthrough performance that ensures his place as a serious up and coming young actor. Under the steady direction of Curtis Hanson, the film moves along at a leisurely pace, much like L.A. Confidential does.  Still, this laidback storytelling is one of the film's charms, and it works for the most part, thought not as successfully as the Coen brothers employed the effect in the Big Lebowski - at times it seems to drag here.  And though it may seem that there is no focus point or message, choices are what the film ultimately divulges is important. While Wonder Boys may move at not move in strides, the sheer talent of the cast manages to help move the story along and there's plot twists and some scenes of sheer brilliance that comes totally unexpected.  For a movie about writers, it certainly captures the struggle of creating and choosing what do next in life as well as literature in an unexpectedly offbeat, sometimes hilarious way.

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