Wonder Boys

I'm a great Michael Chabon fan. I reckon he can't really set a word wrong, all told. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Summerland are both books that really deserve glowing write-ups here (I read them both after this blog began). But I'd not come across Wonder Boys, an early outing of his, and I didn't know it had been adapted to the screen. Imagine my surprise to discover not only that there's a film adaptation, but it features Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr, Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes. They're popular names, if nothing else.

Wonder Boys traces a few days in the life of Prof. Grady Trip (Douglas). He's had that first break-through novel, which has earned him an esteemed, if low-key, position in the great American canon. Now he's teaching creative writing, but he's in a rut. Just as his editor, Crabtree (Downey Jr), comes to visit he discovers a gifted student, James Leer (Maguire). So begins a journey of discovery for professor and student, as the tangled webs of their lives are slowly unpicked. Of course, it helps that Leer's creative talent might stem from a compulsive desire to lie. Fabrication seems to have penetrated every aspect of his life.

This is a remarkably well-observed drama. The dialogue is at times too obvious, and tends towards cliche, but never quite grates, and it's skilfully enough put together that the personalities of the film (Douglas, Maguire) are comfortably negated, or at least softened. It's easy with such big players to expect certain tropes or kinds of performance. But the eccentricities of some (Downey Jr) are underplayed, even if other characters (McDormand in particular, as the long-suffering dean and sometime lover of Douglas), are not really given an opportunity to shine.

It is, in the final analysis, a very American film. It's saturated in questions of creation and discovery, and funny and moving at the right times, without quite taking itself above and beyond the ordinary. It has traces of Chabon's excellence, and one can detect echoes of his emotional charged writing in scenes that never quite soar to the heights they should. But it works, all the same, and remains enjoyable.

~~~

2000

Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes

dir. Curtis Hanson