In the excellent new comedy-drama “Wonder Boys,” Michael Douglas shows a new face: a shaggier, warmer movie persona than we’re used to from him. But as beleaguered novelist and teacher Grady Tripp, it’s a face that by the movie’s end Douglas makes completely his own.
Grady sports a countenance that is worlds away from Douglas’ Armani princes in movies like “The Perfect Murder.” His is the haggard, ill-shaven mug of an educated drunk in a small college’s English department. It’s an amazing deviation from the more slicked-down Douglas we’re used to. Grady, whose face you see beaming from the movie’s poster art, is an angst-ridden writer whose life is, very amusingly, collapsing around him during an apparently doomed college literary festival in Pittsburgh.
“Wonder Boys” is director Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to his widely heralded breakthrough film, “L.A. Confidential,” and it’s an often-wondrous comedy, just as rich and surprising as “L.A. Confidential” but considerably less dark. It’s not only a good showcase for Douglas, it’s a grand, woozy, often breathlessly entertaining ensemble piece.
Hanson, along with screenwriter Steve Kloves (“The Fabulous Baker Boys”), catches vividly and cannily the sort of world the movies often miss: a self-absorbed realm of second-rank literary academia, complete with a maze of collegiate intrigues and mini-scandals. Hanson’s source is Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel, a very inside look at Pittsburgh academia. With unbuttoned writer’s glee, Chabon, a very successful 30ish writer, imagined the troubles of Grady, a similarly successful writer, now sliding into a sedentary, 50ish malaise.
Grady, a literary hero to his students, can’t get his second novel completed, can’t keep his life on track and sees his own lot reflected in the even messier life of his most promising young student, talented but disturbed rich kid James Leer (Tobey Maguire).
One of the movie’s triumphs is that it convinces you that its writers are really writers and that its academics actually read and teach for a living. But these aren’t dry, reclusive writers, even if they are, like Grady, unable to finish their books. During the course of the story’s madly packed three days, with the local convocation, called “Wordfest,” as the ironic backdrop, Grady and James become an unlikely duo, with James plunging wildly into terrible scrapes, from which Grady then tries, often ineptly, to rescue him.
And these misadventures keep exacerbating Grady’s own multiple problems: his absurdly long unfinished novel; the volatile presence of his now-desperate and very promiscuous editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr., in another perfect portrayal of voluptuary excess); his ruined marriage; his ongoing affair with his married boss (Frances McDormand, also perfect as warm-blooded chancellor Sara Gaskell); and his unsatisfied lust for the beauteous young student Hannah Green (“Dawson Creek’s” Katie Holmes), who rents a room in his house.
There are more messes as well, including a stolen jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe, a stolen car that apparently belongs to an angry local dude named Vernon Hardapple (Richard Knox), and, most unsettling of all, the dead pet dog of Sara’s very touchy husband Walter (Richard Thomas), a telltale corpse that somehow winds up in Grady’s trunk.
Most of the best comedies are about essentially serious, even dark, subjects. And “Wonder Boys” is a movie about the literary world — not its hot center, but its frostier, more interesting, fringes. Hanson’s first movie since “L.A. Confidential” is, like that densely populated James Ellroy noir thriller, another supremely literary film. (Ellroy himself even appears in a cameo at a literary soiree.) It’s a movie about people who live and breathe books — who spend their working lives writing or teaching or editing them — but whose private lives are as disorderly and dysfunctional as their books are precisely constructed and artistically designed.
That’s the great American literary tragicomedy. And nobody in this sometimes hilariously disorderly movie is more fouled up than Grady, a teacher disastrously entangled with his boss and his students and a writer who has to compose his endless second novel on a typewriter, while wearing an old pink bathrobe, in a house that his wife has long since deserted.
As Grady, Douglas’ eyes are bleary and sad, his manner harried, and his dialogue, while often caustic, touched with a tender, vulnerable melancholy. And he keeps doing stupid things that get him and his friends into worse fixes, a fallibility that gives the movie a sometimes-maddening believability, along with some nearly surreal nuttiness. Perhaps this performance is so effective because Douglas submerges his charisma — letting it peek through the wreckage of Grady’s life at odd moments.
In a way, there’s something a little stylish about Douglas’ newly frowsy appearance. Yet if we know that he also initiated this project, buying Kloves’ finely honed script, it’s easy to see Grady as another role — very common in Douglas’ canon — where he plays a deludedly self-confident macho man who’s about to see his world go to hell. It’s Grady’s failures that make him sympathetic. Downey meanwhile gains sympathy because of his sinful candor. His offscreen antics add spice to his amusing portrayal of the hell-raising Crabtree, a hedonist who shows up for Wordfest accompanied by a six-foot transvestite (Michael Cavadias).
And McDormand as Sara commands our hearts, as she did in “Fargo,” with a sterling mix of competence and empathy. The passionate friendship between Grady and Sara, one of the best-drawn male-female relationships of any recent American film, works so well partly because of McDormand’s no-nonsense persona but also because of the constant contrast with the younger Hannah, which teases our sense of movie melodramatic cliches. (James, another of Maguire’s endless stock of sensitive youths, carries a Douglas Sirk romance movie in his backpack, a slightly precious switch from Chabon’s book, where James was a Frank Capra fan.)
The title “Wonder Boys” refers to literary prodigies, struggling with the approach of first fame or trying to live up to fame past. Grady is the Wonder Boy who faded, James the Wonder Boy on the rise — and Rip Torn’s literary lion “Q,” the best-selling novelist star of Wordfest, is the Wonder Boy who kept on ticking. In his book, Chabon seemed to be writing himself out of the usual second novel funk by at least partially imagining a series of spectacular failures. But the movie, I think, works even better — even if the ending is a little too conventionally upbeat. It’s that rarity: a movie about writers and writing which both convinces and amuses you, a shaggy literary delight about the hell and purgatory of creation.
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(star) (star) (star) 1/2 (The star rating has been added in this text.)
