The poster for Wonder Boys aroused in me some resistance to seeing it — mostly it was the image of Michael Douglas looking sweet and avuncular, bathed in a golden glow. It all looked unbearably mature and heart-warming.
But the film successfully belies that impression. Douglas is mostly grungy, crabby and bathed in a kind of grey haze. He plays
an ageing professor of creative writing, creatively named Grady Tripp, and a novelist himself. His first novel has become something of a classic, but he’s having trouble with its long-awaited follow-up — the end, as he says, just seems to get further and further away.
The story covers one weekend in Tripp’s life, a chaotic and life-changing weekend that turns into something of a physical and spiritual odyssey. As it starts, his wife has just left him, and his demanding editor is flying in from New York, desperate for some news of the endless novel. Over and above those problems, Tripp has to deal with one seriously weird student, his lissome lodger, his extramarital affair, a hostile dog and a fur-collared jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe …
Douglas is the film’s centre, and he carries it with style, making Tripp both loveable and exasperating, but he is brilliantly buoyed by the ensemble as a whole. Robert Downey Jr is perfect as the needy, seductive editor, and Tobey Maguire captures the oddball student’s strange stillness with a very fine understated performance. Frances McDormand and Katie Holmes, too, do their bit with sterling results.
It’s all down to a good script, of course, one by Steven Kloves (from Michael Chabon’s novel), fluidly directed by Curtis Hanson. One might quibble about the rather pat redemption offered to Tripp, and the movie is, after all, mature and heart-warming. But Wonder Boys has wit and it has momentum, making it a most engaging comedy-with-a-brain, and heaven knows there are few enough of those around.