Huey: Overcoming my alcoholism was the hardest thing I ever had to do. Liquor always helped me to come to terms with the crap going on in my life, and it was so readily available, so culturally acceptable.

Dewey: Overcoming my heroin addiction was the hardest thing I ever had to do. Your body develops a physical dependence on narcotics. There's no pain like the pain of withdrawal. Once you start using heroin, it's as if the universe itself insists that you keep using it.

Louie: Overcoming my marijuana addiction was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I find that I'm just not as hungry as I used to be. It used to be really easy to eat, but now I have to wait for my appetite to develop on its own. And the headaches--how am I supposed to live without the headaches?

The Wonder Boys is about a lot of things, but it is most obnoxiously about how Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) overcomes a dependence on marijuana. If you think, as I do, that the story of overcoming an 'addiction' to marijuana is not worth telling, then I must caution you to go into this film with the absurdist mindset that is required. For none of the stories in The Wonder Boys are worth telling. That's part of what is supposed to be the fun, I guess.

Unfortunately, however, the movie wasn't very much fun for me.

I think that part of the fun of watching ridiculous characters do ridiculous things is that in some bizarre way their motivations make a wacky kind of sense. Nothing about The Wonder Boys makes any kind of sense.

Our protagonist, Grady Tripp, is a novelist whose book, The Arsonist's Daughter, not only won him a prestigious literary award, but a tenured position as a teacher of creative writing at a liberal arts college.

In the seven years since The Arsonist's Daughter was published, he has been working on another book that he doesn't know how to finish. As one of his students tells him, the book is un-unified because he hasn't made any choices. It's just a big mess of lots of stuff happening for no reason. The prose of the book may be beautiful, but it isn't clear what story he is trying to tell or why he is trying to tell it.

In a lot of ways, that book of his is like life. It's like my life and your life and anybody's life in which things seem to happen for no reason. Sometimes the things that happen are interesting; sometimes they're dull. But it's silly for us to expect there to be any kind of point.

Enter James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a belligerently disaffected college student whose tireless imagination prompts him to lie about himself incessantly. He doesn't even bother to make the lies consistent. He figures in his own mind as the main character of a never-ending novel, a novel that resembles life because it doesn't have any point. Since Leer refuses to allow his life to be dull, his lies tend to be melodramatic. Although he lives with his parents in a rather comfortable house, he claims to be involved in an ongoing feud for a spot at the bus station with a homeless man named Karl.

When Tripp is attacked by a dog that belongs to his mistress' husband, Leer shoots the dog because it simply doesn't occur to him to help Tripp fight the dog off. (He's only impractically imaginative, never pragmatically resourceful.) He then steals a jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe so that the audience can learn how small Monroe's shoulders were. Once the dead dog ends up in the trunk of Tripp's car and the stolen jacket ends up in Leer's knapsack, we know we're in for an extremely silly ride. I have to confess, however, that as Leer and Tripp passed joints back and forth in the front seat, I kept expecting Cheech and Chong to materialize behind them.

No matter how silly things become, we are never allowed to forget that Tripp's wife has left him and that his mistress (who is married to his boss, the chair of the English Department) is pregnant. The fact that Frances McDormand is talented enough to breathe something resembling life into the character of the mistress (Sara Gaskell) should not fool anyone into thinking that Gaskell is a real person. She's an adolescent male's idea of a grown woman, a character whose only motivation appears to be her desire to browbeat Tripp into proposing marriage. She's a passive aggressive monster for whom Tripp exhibits an affection that makes no more sense than anything else in the film.

When Tripp decides that he has to abduct Leer from his basement bedroom, Leer points out that his mother has been checking on him. They need to put something in the bed to convince her that Leer is sleeping soundly. Obviously, pillows won't work. Nothing but the dead dog from the trunk of the car will work.

And since the precious Marilyn Monroe jacket has been left in the car, it stands to reason that the car must be stolen by a man who claims to be the owner of the vehicle. Of course it belongs to him. Why else would he have jumped on the hood while Tripp was driving it?

Similarly, when Tripp finds that people have been snooping through his manuscript, it's only natural for him to take it with him while his agent drives him in search of the stolen car. And it makes perfect sense that he would sit with the fifty pound manuscript in his lap. Otherwise, how would the story end up scattered to the four winds when his agent attempts to rescue him from a situation that isn't at all dangerous?

In other words, none of the characters in this film act from any kind of comprehensible motive except the motive of heightening the drama. Passive aggressive women heighten drama, so passive aggressive is what Sara Gaskell must be. Homeless college students heighten drama, so Leer declares himself homeless. Irreplaceable artifacts heighten drama, so Monroe's jacket must exist in order to be stolen. Personal demons heighten drama, but since Grady Tripp doesn't have any, he pretends that his marijuana 'addiction' is crippling him. The Wonder Boys is a story of uncourageous people trying to convince themselves that they are rebellious. It's a tale about sucking the marrow out of life that one reads while nestled underneath a downy comforter. Lots of people (including excellent reviewers on this site) seem to think it's funny.

As for me, I didn't laugh once. But I never stopped rolling my eyes.

Recommended: No