These 'Boys' aren't wonderful, just wonky

Wonder Boys is a lot like Yale: a smatter of homosexuals, a billow of pot smoke, and a gaggle of wannabe writers, all meshed together in such a desperate, consuming blend of self-absorption that the slightest attempt at subtlety collapses into itself. It leaves you to wonder why you ever hoped to imi-tate any of "them" to begin with, not to mention what the hell you were thinking when you paid a decent sum of money to get to that point. But here it is anyway—Curtis Hanson's long-awaited follow-up to his first masterpiece, 1997's L.A. Confidential. For his encore, Hanson has chosen to make a movie based on a 1995 Michael Chabon book about a writer who authors a masterpiece and then has difficulty producing his long-awaited follow-up. The parallel to Hanson's own efforts is only too fitting.

COURTESY PARAMOUNT Pot and powdered donuts replace whiskey and cigarettes.

Here is Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), our tweedy, glamourpuss hero who writes in a tattered pink bathrobe, shaves intermittently, and smokes enough pot to sedate a small horse. Grady has a sort of writer's block—he can't finish his latest book. Fueled by the dope he inhales on a continuous basis, he's managed exactly 2,316 pages. Grady teaches a course, too, and one of his best students is an odd young man, James Leer (Tobey Maguire). Leer is a misfit whose penchant for lies and knack for mischief marks him as the next brilliant novelist, though this is only recognized by Grady and another young student (Katie Holmes) with conspicuously pointy breasts.

It's winter, and the nameless Pittsburgh college where they all work and study is holding its annual writer's symposium. Into the fray bursts Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey, Jr.), a down-on-his luck book editor who has been waiting seven years for Grady's book to pick him back up. Crabtree brings a six-foot tall transvestite with him. Together, our heroes attend a party at the house of the Chancellor (Frances MacDormand), the woman with whom Grady is sleeping, and who also—get this—happens to be the wife of Grady's boss. Soon enough, Crabtree and his companion retreat to the Chancellor's guest bedroom, leaving James to shoot the Chancellor's husband's dog, though not before stealing his most prized possession: the ermine coat Marilyn Monroe wore when she married Joe DiMaggio, Jr. And so our story begins.

And ends. While Chabon's original novel was a humorous, introspective look into the mid-life crisis of a failing writer, Hanson's movie is a tour-de-farce which pays more attention to a dead dog than to Grady's wilting spirit or artistic frustration. Wonder Boys tries hard to examine the bond between Grady and James, though the two are such cookie-cutter images of a struggling writer and lost teen that their relationship is merely a contrivance. Grady tells James that you must "write from the heart"; James tells Grady that his "heart only beats because it has to"; and then, together, they smoke a triumphant joint and eat a lot of powdered donuts.

Wonder Boys is such an uncomfortable piece to watch because it is so naked in its failure. We see exactly where Hanson wants the movie to take us—through the young and old writer's minds—but we never come near to approaching that point.

Film

Wonder Boys Directed by Curtis Hanson Starring Michael Douglas Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey, Jr. Playing at a theater near you this spring break.

Douglas is horribly miscast as a character so narrowly defined that it makes you wonder how an actual writer could have ever created him in the first place. The writer thing is further muddied by the appearance of Q (Rip Torn), a prolific writer who speaks of the art with disgusting pomposity ("I am a writer," he declares to the students). His appearance is the movie in a nutshell: a character with endless possibilities limited by the conceits of the filmmaker. Q has the potential to be an object of delicious mockery, but Hanson has already spent so much time mocking Grady (Look at the pot he smokes! Look how he falls down stairs!) that the appearance of Q seems merely superfluous.

The rest of the cast works hard—Maguire grimaces and smirks and flashes those glassy doe eyes; Downey smokes his Camels and does his best impression of Oscar Wilde on Prozac; Holmes flirts and jiggles like a literary Lolita. But their characters are so vapid that you never really feel like you should care about them at all. In fact, the sole bright point in the film is McDormand, wonderful as always as the sharp, dubious Chancellor who must tolerate Grady's indecisiveness. But she is never quite involved in the whole mess, instead observing the proceedings with a smirking detachment, as if asking the question we have wondered all along: what, exactly, am I doing here?

Back to A&E...