WONDER BOYS
Douglas plays Grady Tripp, a slovenly Pittsburgh English professor
who has had one successful novel to date, but has not produced
anything significant lately except a propensity for seizures and
a dependence on marijuana. He is working on his second book but
has put it aside, although he receives constant pressure from
his bisexual New York editor, Terry Crabtree (Downey), to finish
it. But Grady has other things on his mind: his wife is leaving
him, he is having an affair with the university's married chancellor,
Sara Gaskell (McDormand), and Sara has just told him she is pregnant
with his child. In addition to this, he has two students vying
for his attentions. One is the brooding James Leer (Maguire),
who writes excellent fiction about the dark horrors of his dysfunctional
family and his abusive upbringing. The other is Hannah Green (Katie
Holmes), an attractive, intelligent coed who worships Grady for
his previous novel. The trouble starts at WordFest, the university's
annual writer's conference, where the accidental killing of a
pet named "Poe" sets in motion a bizarre sequence of
events leading Grady to examine his life with the harsh eye of
a literary critic.
This is an author's story in more ways than one. In spite of
the complexity of the plot, there exists the attention to detail
that is a writer's stock in trade, but which must often be sacrificed
in films for the sake of brevity. The characters are delineated
by the kind of pidgeonholing that, while not absolutely representational
of life, shows the writer's subjective point of view. I often
complain of characters not being believable; in this case, their
lack of conventional realism is not because of a failure on the
writers' parts, but because they are an intentional parody on
human nature, a fantastic experiment in the minds of Chabon and
Kloves, realized by Hanson's vision.
Douglas is exquisitely subtle in this film; I love it when
he takes time out from playing wealthy, power-hungry jerks to
craft a real character, and this one is not an easy creation.
We must sympathize with Grady and at the same time abhor him for
his treatment of himself and others. It is said several times
in the text that he is not "there for" someone. In this
way he abuses those closest to him, and he pays for his negligence
when they all abuse him back, each in his or her own way. Hanson's
choices in directing McDormand, Downey, and Maguire are fascinating
— James, Terry, and Sarah appear as Grady sees them,
like characters in a book, the necessary creations of a writer
for narrative purposes.
Wonder Boys suffers occasionally from a diffusion of sorts, as the multitude of subplots must sometimes be neglected in favor of one another. But this is a minor flaw in an otherwise clever, intelligent literary experience. ****½