Director Curtis Hanson had easily the most successful film of his career with his last effort, L.A. Confidential. That was a crime drama that combined the 'film noir' detective style of the 1940s with the graphic violence and 'realism' of more recent decades.
His latest effort, Wonder Boys, is completely different. It's as much a comedy as a drama, and it breaks ground only in its frequent, casual use of homosexual themes. Like American Beauty, it is a "coming of middle age" movie. In this film, however, the central character is reacting to rather than generating the changes in his life.
Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) teaches an advanced writing course at the University of Pittsburgh. His best student is James Leer (Tobey Maguire), whose stories are relentlessly morbid. While James is unpopular with most of his fellow students, Hannah (Katie Holmes) sticks up for him. But her romantic ambitions are fixed instead on her professor, Grady.
Her chances improve when Grady's wife abandons him. Grady isn't grieving, however, since he is having an affair with Sara Gaskell (Francis McDormand). Unfortunately, Sara is both pregnant with Grady's child, and wed to Grady's boss Walter (Richard Thomas).
Meanwhile, Grady has been working on the long awaited follow-up to his first successful novel. He's written two thousand pages, but there's no ending in sight. Grady's agent Terry (Robert Downey Jr.) is visiting to check on its progress. Instead, both Grady and Terry must take care of James, whose suicidal and criminal tendencies threaten to end his literary career before it has even begun.
Wonder Boys is one of those films where every main character is having an adulterous or homosexual romance with somebody else. These relationships are generally regarded as subject for comedy, and make for a tangled, juicy set of storylines. In fact, when Grady turns down a college student's pass, it's not because he doesn't think he shouldn't. It's because his life is already too complicated.
Combining James' larcenous theft, the complicity of Grady and Terry, and Grady's rampant drug abuse, there may be more crimes committed in Wonder Boys than there was in L.A. Confidential. But at least nobody gets hurt. I understand the various characters' fascination for Sara's greenhouse. It's the only place where everything is normal.
All loose ends are tied up in a blissful, unlikely happy ending for all concerned. Even for John Boy Walton, whose ridiculous cultural analysis concerning Marilyn Monroe is finally published.
There are good performances all around. Douglas is completely comfortable with his difficult role, as a complacent professor whose life has suddenly spun out of control. Maguire's character is less credible. His blank-faced morality in Pleasantville and The Cider House Rules has changed into an eccentric, deadpan indifference as to what may follow. Robert Downey Jr. has escaped prison long enough to make his character avoid a comic homosexual stereotype. Katey Holmes is mostly window dressing, while Frances McDormand does little more than vent angrily at Douglas' indecisions. (62/100)
In Curtis Hanson's WONDER BOYS based on the novel by Michael Chabon Michael Douglas delivers one of his most compelling performances as Grady Tripp a ...More at Family Video
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