Wonder Boys

Day 269 - 9/26/09 - Movie #269

BEFORE: This one wasn't part of my original plan, taped this off cable last week. The tricky part for me is determining whether a movie that I've never seen is worth adding to my list. Sometimes I have nothing to go on but a movie's perceived reputation, or my recollections of reviews from when it was released.

THE PLOT: An English Professor tries to deal with his wife leaving him, the arrival of his editor who has been waiting for his book for seven years, and the various problems that his friends and associates involve him in.

AFTER: Damn, now I wish I hadn't included this in my chain of movies about schools. Though the film is set in a college, there's very little classroom time shown. Mostly it's a wild 2-day period in the life of a professor (Michael Douglas) who's also an author. Surrounding him are his book editor (Robert Downey Jr.), his mistress (Frances McDormand) and a couple of students (Tobey Maguire + Katie Holmes). There's some sort of annual literary event at the school, so there's a big party, which means alcohol and various drugs, and hook-ups, and this leads to confusion, grand larceny, and a dead dog in the trunk of a car, among other things.

Along the way, there's a lot of talk about writing, the process of writing, what it means to be a writer, what a writer does when he can't write, and what a writer does when he can't stop. Whatever the opposite of writer's block is, that's what Prof. Tripp has...

But for plot purposes, no one uses a word processor to write (what year was this made?) or else people wouldn't be seen using old electric typewriters dramatically (I guess it's more cinematic to see someone stare at a blank page than a blinking cursor), or they wouldn't be able to stumble upon and read each other's manuscripts, which happens several times in this film. A typed manuscript also means that there is no saved file, no computer back-up of the proposed novels, and this too is important to the plot. This makes the manuscripts valuable, so in the course of this wild evening and following day, if the drafts get lost, they're gone forever.

Tobey Maguire does a good job playing the mopey student who (eventually) comes into his own, and Robert Downey Jr. plays the slick book editor...um, slickly. (Hey, it's the future Spider-Man and the future Iron Man together! Did anyone else ever notice that?) But Katie Holmes is pretty much a blank, and Frances McDormand's talents are pretty under-utilized here. There was one girl in the writing class who looked very familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place her - ah, thanks to IMDB I learned it was Charis Michelsen, who I met in the real world - she was the artist's model for the lead female role in "I Married a Strange Person", an animated feature I worked on.
Also there's a cameo from Alan Tudyk (Steve the Pirate from "Dodgeball") as a janitor.

It's too bad that I just didn't fathom a lot of this film, too many wild occurences during the course of the 2-day period (I didn't even mention the transvestite...) so it ended up feeling more like a "Harold and Kumar" far-fetched road-trip film to me. At one point a character inquiring about Prof. Tripp's novel says, "Well, if you didn't know what it was about, why were you writing it?" I'd like to ask the same question of this film's screenwriter...

RATING: 4 out of 10 drafts