Whoever came up with the marketing campaign for Wonder Boys obviously didn’t see the movie beforehand. If they had, they might have realized that the unshaven, cutesy image of a tousled Michael Douglas looking like he can’t wait to warm our hearts was entirely inappropriate. It does not convey what the movie is about. As a matter of fact, if I had seen the ad before the movie, I would have stayed away, assuming it was a one-man show about a delightfully wacky old guy. Maybe I’m just overreacting because this film shoved down my throat the charms of a movie star whose box office appeal is behind him.
There are more people in Wonder Boys than Michael Douglas. He plays Grady Tripp, (okay, okay, so he is a delightfully wacky old guy), a writer whose fifteen minutes of fame have dried up. He teaches writing and tries to wrangle the two thousand plus pages he’s written as his follow-up novel into something worthy and marketable. The impressive cast includes Frances McDormand as Sara Gaskell, with whom Grady is having an affair. Then there is her husband, fellow professor and writer Walter Gaskell, (played by an alarmingly unrecognizable Richard Thomas, TV’s John Boy), an old friend of Grady’s. Tobey Maguire is James Leer, Grady’s most talented writing student, who is somewhat off-center and elusive, or at least pretends to be. Robert Downey, Jr. is Terry Crabtree, Grady’s editor, who needs another success and spends most of the movie being borderline desperate.
Wonder Boys is enjoyable mostly for the characters, and though they tend to be easily categorized (goofy student with hidden brilliance, abrasively witty New York editor, babe student with crush on professor, eccentric but lovable professor in pink bathrobe), the performers manage to pull their respective characters above clich. It’s been a while since Michael Douglas played a role that even approached appealing. Try not to think about the Catherine Zeta-Jones thing, and you’ll be able to enjoy his work here. It’s too bad we know so much about celebrities’ personal lives; it can work its way into your opinion of how they do their job. In Wonder Boys, it’s nice to see him with a woman closer to his own age. Katie Holmes plays a student with a crush on Grady, a crush that is thankfully rebuffed. The ickiest moment surprisingly has nothing to do with Michael Douglas. I winced at the morning-after scene with a topless Robert Downey Jr.
There is a lot for which to recommend Wonder Boys (directed by Curtis Hanson, whose last film was L.A. Confidential). The acting is uniformly enjoyable, but am I the only one who thinks Tobey Maguire looks like he could fall asleep at any moment? He needs to explore his range a little. This is a well-written movie. There are some genuinely funny moments. It’s engaging and, well, kind of sweet. Okay, it occasionally veers into unnecessary plot lines, it’s too long, and it wraps up too neatly, but it’s a well-made piece of convention. It deserves notice because it’s not like anything else out there right now. It also deserves an advertising campaign that includes more of the cast.
+ David Kern
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