Smart People Not Smart Enough to Overcome Its Own Mediocrity

Steps to making your own independent Sundance film: create a set of dysfunctional characters, each with some humorous quirks, and fill them with A-list actors who are willing to take a small paycheck in return for critical praise. Set your story in a tiny town that could be anywhere, USA. Make sure your plot has as few legitimate points as possible, mainly using long shots of characters staring off into the distance as the centerpiece of the movie. Finally, include as much indie rock as you can, but make sure no one has ever heard of your awesome favorite bands.

Smart People could easily be classified as that sort of indie movie. If you’ve seen films like Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, or American Splendor, you already know what will happen throughout Smart People. It truly embodies what has gone wrong with the great Sundance Film Festival (Miramax bought the film before its premiere in January, hoping to market it through the Ellen Page angle). And while it is occasionally funny, and some of the performances are well-done, everything else about Smart People is so annoying that it is hard to derive any pleasure from this film.

The plot begins with Dennis Quaid as Lawrence, a highly pompous, self-absorbed English professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Western Pennsylvania. He only cares about two things in life: getting his book published and becoming head of the department. His daughter Vanessa, played by Juno’s Page, is a robotic teenager who only cares about getting her perfect SAT score and leading the Young Republicans group at her school. When Lawrence finds himself suffering a seizure, his doctor and former student Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker) revokes his license. Enter Lawrence’s adopted brother Chuck, played by Thomas Haden Church (Sideways), an unpredictable slob short on cash. Vanessa devises the perfect scheme: Chuck will live in the home, and become Lawrence’s driver. At the same time, Lawrence starts to move on past his dead wife and begins dating Janet.

If you’ve seen any film that sounds similar to this, you know what will happen at the end of Smart People: nothing big, but the characters will be slightly less depressed. The plot is unbelievably predicable, and all of the humor is forced. There is an unnecessary number of time that characters stare into space, as if they were actually having some sort of crisis. But the characters are so flat and undeveloped that any feeling you could possibly have for them is just as contrived as their personalities.

The few saving graces of the film are Page and Church. Even if they are playing characters similar to some of their previous roles, they know how to work with really bad dialogue. The scenes that they share actually feel honest and real, and the movie would work better if they were the main characters.

That being said, Smart People is still a very unfunny and unreal film that feels like a carbon copy of every other Sundance film. Just because one has a marketable star does not mean one has a good movie on hand.