This review first appeared on BackStage.com

By Wayne Melton
From a casting perspective, Smart People is a carefully constructed indie drama in the mold of recent hits like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno, with an assortment of movie and television stars, famous faces, newcomers, and veteran character actors all pitching in to bring real life to the latest quirky melodrama. It even stars Juno’s Ellen Page in another turn as a crusty high school kid. The only difference (besides the lack of embryo) is that she’s a right-winger this time.

Movies like Smart People are often aimed at captivating an elusive moviegoing segment that may have turned its back on the big-budget behemoths. To that end these so-called indie or limited-release movies are typically populated with a variety of talent to help make up for any other perceived lack of reach. Hence we have marquee names such as Dennis Quaid as a stodgy college English professor and Sarah Jessica Parker as his love interest, an M.D. burned out on romance, sharing time with indie darling Page, who plays Quaid’s overprotective, uptight, Young Republican daughter and journeyman Thomas Haden Church as Quaid’s out-of-work brother, in town to help out around the house and provide slacker comic relief. Ashton Holmes, the son from A History of Violence, playing an angst-ridden college-aged poet, is the only participant whose part was genuinely lost somewhere in the process, but the rest of the performances are as varied as the cast and as spotty as the story about a man and his midlife crisis.

As that Carnegie Mellon University professor, Lawrence Wetherhold, Quaid seems convinced that playing a man with a bunch of degrees means speaking through his nose and walking like he’s trying to carry the blackboard eraser between his butt cheeks. That’s as close as we come to a true portrayal. Though there will be few English professors in the audience, most of the people sitting there will have had or at least met one during their lifetime, and to them Mr. Wetherhold will feel like a caricature.

Though Smart People may often seem like a sitcom that somehow graduated to the multiplex, it contains a few bright comic moments, most of which come from the irascible Church, who chews up countless scenes behind thrift-store sweaters and an undomesticated goatee. Single-handedly saving the day numerous times, he always seems to be there whenever the movie needs a spark, delivering dry lines such as “You’re a monster” to Page’s SAT-obsessed student with perfect comic timing.

Smart People works only insofar as you don’t grade it by its own standards. Wetherhold, we learn, once gave Parker’s doc a C on her Bleak House paper for unoriginality, and one is tempted to levy the same judgment here. It’s evident from the outset that the title is sarcastic, that the movie means to show up these so-called smart people for the incompetents at life that they really are. But you may be left with an uncomfortable thought in the process: If the filmmakers really expect us to buy these characters as intellectuals, whom do they consider the stupid people?

Genre: Comedy/Drama

Directed by: Noam Murro

Written by: Mark Jude Poirier

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church