Sure, I could have seen the new Jurassic World this weekend. As I type this, the weekend isn’t over, but I’m still not entirely comfortable in crowds. And the reviews have not exactly been all that good. I’m sure I’ll see it at some point, probably before the week is out, but I’m not in any rush. In the meantime, why not go for a movie with Michael Douglas as college professor with a whole different set of problems?
Insert dinosaur joke about Michael Douglas’s age here.
Grady Tripp (Douglas) is a mildly frustrated author and a creative writing professor for a Pennsylvania college. His wife has just left him, and he has a book overdue. But things are about to get worse. It’s the weekend for his college’s big writing festival. Grady has been having an affair with his school chancellor Sara (Frances McDormand), wife to Grady’s department head Walter (Richard Thomas), and she’s pregnant. One of Grady’s students, Hannah (Katie Holmes), rents a room from Grady and is clearly smitten with him. Another student, the dark and moody James (Tobey Maguire), also attaches himself to Grady while at a party at Walter and Sara’s house. In an attempt get through to James, Grady takes James into an upstairs room at the house where Walter keeps his beloved Marilyn Monroe jacket, a jacket worn by the movie star only once. James loves old movies, and he’s taken with the jacket…enough to take it with him when no one is looking. Oh, and Walter’s blind old dog doesn’t care for Grady, and when the dog attacks Grady, James shoots it dead. Between all that, Sara’s belief that Grady is still pining for the wife who left him, and the fact Grady can’t stop smoking pot, it’s not going to be a good weekend.
It’s made worse because Grady’s sexually promiscuous editor Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr) has come to town because he really needs Grady’s new book, something that both men hope will somehow meet the level of success Grady had with his first. Oh, and another man keeps claiming he is the real owner of Grady’s car. With a dead dog and a stolen jacket in his trunk, a 2500+ page manuscript that isn’t close to finished, and a moody young man who has a shaky relationship with the truth as it is, can Grady get his life sorted out again?
I honestly wasn’t expecting this one. I know director Curtis Hanson best for LA Confidential, and this movie is nothing like that one. Instead, it’s a light comedy of errors, one where Douglas’s Grady needs to find the courage to make some major decisions in his life. He’s in love with Sara, but he’s not brave enough to tell Walter or firm enough to convince Sara that this is true. He needs to tell Sara about the Marilyn jacket and the dead dog in his trunk, but he never finds the courage to give more than a half-hearted “I love you.” Though he’s clearly not that upset about his wife’s leaving him, he likewise can’t seem to convince Sara that this is true. James is an enigma who has attached himself to Grady, and while Crabtree may or may not be helpful, he’s not all that reliable. If anything, it seems like everyone Grady knows is only there to make his life worse, and his own general emotional cowardice isn’t really helping.
Granted, this is still a comedy, and comedies usually end happily enough. There’s not much going on here that seems particularly like a life or death situation, and most of Grady’s problems can be settled with a good conversation. About the only thing I can say that didn’t sit well is Downey’s character playing a promiscuous gay man, a stereotype that doesn’t really help much. That said, the way he kept looking at Maguire in various scenes reminded me of the hilarious fake trailers at the start of Tropic Thunder, and I can’t get too upset about that now, can I?
Grade: B+
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