Flick of The Day: Wonder Boys

Film-maker Curtis Hanson followed up his Oscar winning crime drama, LA Confidential, with another adaptation in this small, fun literary comedy, set at an unnamed Pittsburgh University. The film chronicles a lost weekend in the life of novelist, Prof Grady Tripp, as his life falls apart around his ears and anything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Wonder Boys

Michael Douglas plays strongly against type, shedding his leading man image to play a scruffy, likeable professor suffering from writers block who spends his free time smoking marijuana. Struggling to write the follow up to his best selling novel of 8 years previous, his wife leaves him, his agent comes to town in search of the novel, all while Grady tries to keep one of his students out of jail. This all occurs during a weekend in which a literary festival, Wordfest, takes place on the college campus. Grady struggles to keep all of these balls in the air while events take one hilarious turn after another.

Douglas is fantastic as Grady Tripp, trying to maintain a calm exterior as things collapse around him. The script is peppered with numerous one liners of Douglas has some of the best:

Grady Tripp: I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out how to tell the Chancellor I murdered her husband's dog.
James Leer: You?
Grady Tripp: Trust me, James, when the family pet's been assassinated, the owner doesn't want to hear one of her students was the trigger man.
James Leer: Does she want to hear it was one of her professors? 

Grady Tripp: ...I've got tenure.

He is though part of a fine cast with Robert Downey Jr as Grady's deranged New York literary agent, out to have a good time at anyone's expense. Tobey Maguire stands out as the oddball student who goes off the rails over the course of the weekend, his natural standoffishness giving the character a peculiar but touching and endearing quality. Rip Torn also stands out as the narcissistic blow hard author, Quentin Morewood.

This is a very funny film, the dog assassination stands out in particular, but it does have a warm heart at its center. Grady eventually manages to get his life in order and like all great stories, the loose ends are tied up but not before we meander through a demi-monde of oddball characters, each bringing their own little part of the tale.

A commercial failure on its original release, this film deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible for it has a fine, funny script, and some great characters, which is more then can be said for so much of the current Hollywood output.