Wonder Boys: Drama.  Starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Francis McDormand, Katie Holmes, Robert Downey Jr., Jane Adams, Richard Thomas and Rip Torn. Screenplay by Steven Kloves; based upon the novel by Michael Chabon.  Directed by Curtis Hanson.  Rated “R”.  Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

If you attended a small liberal arts college and have been itching for a reunion, now’s your chance.  Take a trip into the new film Wonder Boys.  Set on the wintry campus and locality of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, P.A., this film captures the essence of an intimate college experience brilliantly. However, much like a hip bar with bad beer, atmosphere is just about all this film gives you. There seems to be a bit of false advertising here. Unlike the trailer, which depicts complicated sub plots and intrigue, the film unfurls much more smoothly and, consequently, a lot less interestingly.  Staying true to its literary inspiration, the film moves quite slowly and has an understated narrative.

Wonder Boys opens on the night the University’s renowned literary festival, aptly named Wordfest, kicks off.  This weekend event serves as the backdrop for the various characters to collide into one another while on their literary highs and lows.  Michael Douglas plays Grady Tripp, an English Professor who established his reputation seven years earlier with an acclaimed novel called Arsonist’s Daughter, but hasn’t published anything since.  Grady is not having a good day…his wife has left him and his editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) is coming in from New York.  How does he cope with such misfortune?  Well, he lights up a joint.  The film truly begins when Tripp, wanting to relax before meeting Crabtree, lights his first (of many) joint.  Smoking dope becomes the film’s most blatant motif, it closes and opens scenes and acts as a symbol for Tripp’s failings in his writing and personal life.  

The stoned Tripp meets Crabtree and his new friend, the sumptuous transvestite Miss Sloviak/Tony (Michael Cavaias), and the rapidly expanding group goes to the Wordfest kick-off party.  The ‘fun’ has just begun.  The gathering is being held at Chancellor Sara Gaskell (Francis McDormand) and Professor Walter Gaskell’s (Richard Thomas) home.  The Chancellor turns out to be Grady’s girlfriend and she has a surprise to clutter his already tumultuous day.  She’s pregnant and the poor, high professor is faced with another dilemma.  Not only does he need to produce another novel in order to fortify his career but he also has to decide what to do about his wife and now pregnant mistress.

So what does he do? That’s right- he goes outside and smokes a joint.  There he runs into his dark, sulking student James Leer (Tobey Maguire).  At this point in the film you’re starting to get a bit of a contact high from all the smoke, but the exchanges between Grady and James make you too depressed to do so.  The two basically talk about nothing during their various exchanges throughout the film; they swap literary references and potential story plots, but these scenes do little in terms of character development.  All you get is that James is a pathological liar and a borderline psycho while Professor Tripp has an unreasonable need to protect and nurture his students.  No matter how demented they might seem. 

But the weirder James gets, the closer Grady becomes to him.  Subsequently, the two get hurled into a series of misadventures including the student shooting and killing the Chancellor’s husband’s dog (who hates Grady as he is the one who is cuckolding his master), some sexual exploration and a whole lot of dope smoking (let’s throw some Codeine in there as well).

Nevertheless, James is the sprocket of the film.  He brings all the characters together and makes sure they turn in the right direction.  He becomes a catalyst for change in Grady’s and other characters’ lives.  But change always comes with some kinks.  Wonder Boys’ kinks come in the form of side-bar characters that pop their heads into the plot and steer it into other directions.  Like Grady’s student and housemate Hannah Green (Katie Holmes) who is constantly trying to seduce her mentor, while also extolling her classmate James and all his many peculiar virtues.  And the high-strung “Vernon Hardapple” (Richard Knox) whose randomly dispersed appearances make for comedy relief and feelgood Hollywood moments.  

Among this group of motley characters, Grady resolves his life crisis.  A crisis that begins with a bang, but ends in a whimper.  The conclusion of Wonder Boys, like most contemporary Hollywood films, is a disappointment.  It leaves you a bit unsatisfied and disappointed, muck like the pasty, stale desert you ate at your college reunion.

Similar to mingling at an academic gathering, the film only skims the surface of its characters’ lives and psyches.  The characters are introduced, but are never fully explored.  Wonder Boys asks its audience to have a good deal of faith in the comments made by other characters regarding one another.  For example, James Leer.  Everyone admires him as a potentially brilliant writer.  Yet there is nothing presented to convince you of that.

Nevertheless, the ensemble cast interacts fluidly as if they had all gone to a small liberal arts college together.  The actors have a good energy between them that make their interactions believable. Michael Douglas plays a convincing professor, and it’s not just the glasses and tweed jackets they make him wear.  This ain’t no Romancing the Stone Michael Douglas; this is a fairly significant role for him and illustrates his versatility as an actor.

Wonder Boys also adds a new dimension to director Curtis Hanson’s filmography.  As Hanson illustrated in L.A. Confidential, he has a talent for creating a sense of mood and environment.  This newest feature is another example of Hanson’s wonderful skill. Wonder Boys quickly establishes the consistent milieu of an intimate, supportive and self-contained academic community.  The film oozes with a college atmosphere in which professors mentor their students, live with their students and smoke dope with their students.  But this film has neither the depth nor breadth of his other films.  Hopefully, in his next feature, Hanson will delve deeper into his characters’ lives rather than their habits.