A movie called “Smart People” with the tagline “Sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn” ought to feel, well, smarter. Particularly if the movie’s target audience is smart people.

One of the movie’s earliest sequences is illustrative.

Lawrence Wetherhold is a widowed and tenured Lit prof who knows his stuff backward and forward and has gotten stuck in a rut. He knows how to work the system, and how to make the system work for him. The department chair is open, and he’s just been asked to lead the search committee. He’s arrogant enough to think he deserves it, and disdainful enough to think that what’s really important is the book he’s working on.

Lawrence stops by to pay a sarcastic visit to his supposedly underachieving, unambitious son, who happens to live in a campus dorm. While he’s there, his car gets towed. When he tries to retrieve his car from impound, he discovers that the attendant not only won’t honor the “arrangement” that the prof has with campus security regarding his car, but that the uncooperative oaf is a former student whose name he never bothered to try to remember… a student whose undeservedly bad grades produced a deserved grudge against the prof. And Lawrence is out of luck. So he awkwardly climbs a security fence to retrieve his briefcase, and in his stiffly middle-aged fashion throws himself back over the fence… and winds up in the hospital.

From here, we get to meet Dr. Hartigan (also a former student), Lawrence’s over-achieving and sardonically witty high-schooler Vanessa, and Lawrence’s spectacularly underachieving “adopted brother” Chuck.

Guess who turns out to be the “smartest” character in the film?

There have been some really sharp movies about bright people in recent years: Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, even this year’s Charlie Bartlett. And one of the things that characterizes these sharp movies is that they don’t condescend to anybody—not even the “smart” people.

Think of Good Will Hunting, for instance. Sure, Chuckie gets some of the best lines; but he’s never held up as the “real” model of intelligence in the film. Similarly, Will has got his problems; but the film never suggests that the answers for his problems lie in the palms of slackers. Will and Chuckie are two sides of the same coin, and they genuinely like and care for each other.

In Smart People, though, Chuck—wonderfully played by Thomas Haden Church in typically Churchian fashion—is held up as the only character with lessons to teach. The “smart” people in the film have nothing to offer; they only have faults.

Now, does any of this matter? Does skewing sympathies toward Chuck make the movie less entertaining, or am I just carping?

I think it does matter. With Lawrence and Vanessa being sympathetic characters only in who they become but not who they are, all of their scenes come off as oddly slack because they aren’t three-dimensional. By only allowing them a third dimension under Chuck’s influence, the film often feels like a parade of cut-out paper smart-dolls. Worse, by playing all the smartness for smugness, even the smartness is robbed of its wit.

A movie called “Smart People” ought to remind us of All About Eve. A movie that merely reminds us of smart people we resent ought to be called “Smug People.”

The effort here is competent enough; but the film simply should have been called something else. The bar is set too high by the title, and these people just aren’t smart enough.

Smart People is rated R for “language, brief teen drug and alcohol use, and for some sexuality.” I think I’d give this a PG-13. There’s nothing here that’s going to corrupt your kids, and the drug and alcohol stuff is very pedestrian. And sexuality? Please. Very mild.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Smart People.