Two and 1/2 stars
Everyone knows or has met someone who is so dazzlingly brilliant yet, oddly enough, also lacks common sense, some sense of social graces or even just "street smarts."
Such individuals may be able to passionately expostulate on the whys and wherefores of quantum physics but lack the simple understanding of how to nuke a microwave dinner.
Social observer Malcolm Gladwell cites such individuals as these as suffering from "selective autism." In the movie "Smart People," director Noam Murro suggests that such a combination of focus and disconnectedness is more an emotional self-defense mechanism than a psychological anomaly.
Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is a professor of Victorian literature at Carnegie Mellon University. His brilliance is often blunted by his insensitive, acerbic selfishness.
Wetherhold is someone who has succeeded in academe in spite of himself. Truth be told, however, Wetherhold has withdrawn within himself and his work, primarily due to the passing of his wife.
Wetherhold's otherwise cynical and caustic teenage daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page), has developed a keen, if subdued, need to protect her father from the outside world. Then there's Wetherhold's vagabond adopted brother, Chuck (Thomas Hayden Church), who has decided to move in with his stepbrother to reconnect with the family.
Bad move. It doesn't take Chuck long to realize he's in a house of brilliant people who talk and live exclusively at cross-purposes to one another. Chuck may be a bum, but at least he has some sense of life and humanity.
However, hope arrives in the form of an emergency room doctor, Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former student of Wetherhold's.
Despite Wetherhold's intellectual elitism and boorish behavior toward his students, she always had sort of a begrudging crush on the guy.
As Chuck lectures his brother to "go for it," Wetherhold, somewhere in the deep recesses of his book knowledge and wounded heart, realizes this may be his only opportunity to finally connect with another human being in an emotional and meaningful way. In the meantime, Vanessa struggles to reconcile herself with the knowledge that her father is dating a woman old enough to understand him, yet young enough to be her older sister.
And let's not even talk about Vanessa's growing attraction to her uncle.
Director Murro and his screenwriter, Mark Jude Poirier, think there's something amusing or funny to say about the foibles of Wetherhold and his clan, but the filmmakers never seem to be able to find just what it might be.
In large part, that's because these characters aren't so much funny as they are either tragic or pathetic. The strange thing is that the actors are likable, even if their characters are not.
Page shows her performance in "Juno" wasn't that of a one-hit wonder, although her Vanessa could be perceived as a right-wing, ultra-conservative variation on Juno. Quaid's performance as Wetherhold adroitly suggests a man who is simultaneously bright and ignorant, yet forever wounded by the realities of life.
But it is Church who hordes what humor and common sense exists in "Smart People." His is the irony of being the learned fool amongst knowledgeable people who are really quite dense about life.
Because of its characters, "Smart People" doesn't come across as either a comedy or a drama. It's a vaguely collected series of episodes highlighting people who should be intelligent but aren't.
Conflicted people, maybe. Smart? No way.