Intelligent Design.(Movie review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Dennis Quaid's smug professor woos Sarah Jessica Parker's beguiling ex-student in Smart People. John Powers reviews.

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, humanity becomes extinct because of an unexpected flaw in our evolutionary development: Our big brains turn out to be a curse. The same idea runs through Smart People, a brisk new comedy about high-powered individuals whose intelligence makes them dumb.

Dennis Quaid stars as Lawrence Wetherhold, a Carnegie-Mellon English professor who, since his wife's death, has sunk into self-absorbed egotism. He's passed that arrogance on to his seventeen-year-old daughter, Vanessa ( Juno' s Ellen Page), an SAT-obsessed Young Republican who insists that the brainy "don't need to compensate by caring about people." But their self-satisfied world starts to crumble when it's invaded by Wetherhold's adopted brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), a shambly middle-aged slacker who makes it his mission to save Vanessa from becoming an "android." While he teaches her to get high, the professor finds himself attracted to Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), an alluring ex-student whose name he'd never bothered to learn. As he woos her clumsily--"Do you like the Victorians?"--she battles her own fear of intimacy.

Screenwriter Mark Poirier is good at satirizing academic pettiness--he neatly skewers the turf wars and tweedy posturing--and even better at writing clever banter. When the officious young Vanessa tells Chuck, "You should really make your bed. It sets the tone for the day," he gruffly replies, "How do you know what tone I want to set?" Trouble is, we don't always know what tone the movie wants to set either. Each time rookie director Noam Murro tries to touch the deeper psychological chords of Wetherhold and Janet's romance, we wish we knew more. Sure, the prof's smart, but why did he turn into what Janet calls "a pompous windbag"? And why exactly does this otherwise sensible woman always flee men who love her? Parker and Quaid are savvy pros, and you can sense them using their wiles to flesh out sketchily conceived characters.

What keeps this gossamer story tethered to Earth is Juliette Binoche's transfixing brilliance

The movie's real pleasure lies in Vanessa's funny, off-kilter misadventures with Uncle Chuck, who can be as belatedly childish as she is prematurely adult. With his square jaw, irresponsible grin, and voice of a pixilated surfer, Church is a crack comic actor whose lazy deadpan is the perfect counterpoint to Page's sassy but square overachiever. Although she won't get any Oscar nominations for this role--Vanessa's the easy-listening version of Juno--Page plays it with an impeccably light touch, letting soulful vulnerability peer through her wisecracks. Only 21, this superb actress has something that American movies need: She knows how to play smart.