WONDER BOYS
by Les Phillips

I wanted to like Wonder Boys. It's been a bad year for films, and it would be nice to think that there really have been a few good ones. I like campus stories. I like Michael Chabon's fiction, though I hadn't read this novel. I think Curtis Hanson is a wonderful director. I also think Steve Kloves is a wonderful director (The Fabulous Baker Boys), and he wrote the screenplay. The setting is Pittsburgh; they really shot it in Pittsburgh. The U. Pitt. campus evokes darkness, seriousness, the kind of grumpy introspection that suits this story. That darkness is assisted by the winter Pittsburgh climate (really shitty; rains and sleets and snows all the time).

But Michael Douglas is at the center of this film. If it weren't for Michael Douglas, I'm sure the picture wouldn't have been made in the first place, and I suppose worse things could have happened. I have to confess that I'm not very neutral toward Michael Douglas. I think he's immensely overrated as an actor. I resent the mysterious power and popularity he appears to have within the industry. And, from all reports, he doesn't seem to be the sort of person I'd care to have over to dinner.

Douglas plays a depressed, dissolute pothead professor of literature and creative writing who nevertheless has a following among students, projects a moral core and a sense of fundamental decency, and is attractive to Frances McDormand, who plays a decidedly undissolute academic superstar. He is good at conveying the depression, dissolution, and potheadedness, but what other qualities anyone could possibly see in him, we're left to take for granted.

Sorry, no. And this is a real problem, given the extraordinarily irresponsible actions we see him take in the course of the film. (With a different tone, which here would have to mean a different actor, those actions could be funny. They're deadly serious, even horrifying here. The performance has no range.)

 

Douglas is, of course, aging badly, a useful feature here.

I had not thought much of Tobey Maguire in previous movies - he didn't seem to have the charisma to carry the lead in Pleasantville, and in The Ice Storm his vacancy was supposed to convey some sort of profundity and (like most other things in that film) simply conveyed vacancy. He's good here, playing a brilliant, troubled, complicated writing student.
It's a blank sort of performance, but it's just suggestive enough. The film would be better if you learned more about him, but that would require giving Douglas less screen time for staggering around.

Frances McDormand and Richard Thomas are very fine. All of the scenes involving university parties, academic politics, etc., are dead on. Robert Downey, Jr. is convincing as an engaging slut.

An actor who played the protagonist, Grady Tripp, in a way that conveyed his moral center and convinced you that he deserved his happy ending, would have made this a fine film instead of a minor, off-center sort of pleasure. Douglas isn't a good enough actor - or isn't interested in being a good enough actor.

CineScene, 2000