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Un-lost on DVD: Wonder Boys |
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Monday, 23 October 2006 |
by D.W. O'Dell
Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire
3 Oscar Nomination (winner, best song)
 The old saying goes that if a film is a hit, it’s because of the marketing; if a film fails, well, even marketing can’t save a bad picture. Wonder Boys had the heck marketed out of it, and it still failed even though it is far from a bad film. Books could be written analyzing the reasons why it flopped.
Wonder Boys was released in February of 2000, hardly the prime time to release a film with Oscar aspirations. The film was re-released later in the year for Oscar consideration, to no avail. It did pick up nominations for editing and adapted screenplay, and good ol’ Bob Dylan won a statue for his theme song “Things Have Changed.” But considering the pedigree of the creative people behind the film, it should have done much, much better than $20 million domestic box office and 3 nominations in relatively minor categories.
The film stars Michael Douglas as an English professor named Grady Tripp who is having a bad day—his wife left him that morning, his mistress (who is the chancellor of his college and the wife of his department head) announces she is pregnant with his child, and his star pupil may be considering suicide (or he could have just eaten a bad bagel; it’s a close call). Add in a strange man accusing him of stealing his car and his editor hounding him for his latest manuscript (which is running well over 2,000 single-spaced pages long), and it’s no wonder Professor Tripp is constantly “clearing his head” with a few homemade cigarettes.
This is Douglas’ best screen performance, far better than his one dimensional posturing in Wall Street. He’s a little too old for the role; it is supposedly seven years after Tripp published his first novel and was considered a “boy wonder,” so the character should be in his mid-30s and not over 50 as Douglas was. Nevertheless, Douglas pulls off the neat trick of playing someone with no plans for the future yet who is not wandering aimlessly. He also does a good job of playing a complete loser who is still plausibly found attractive by women (the scene where the sexually notorious Douglas rejects the advances of a profoundly jiggly Katie Holmes is worth the price of a DVD rental by itself).
A pre-Spidey Tobey Maguire nearly steals the picture as Douglas’ student, who always appears to be a random neuron-flash away from stepping in front of a train. Such a sad sack could be grating, but Maguire manages to convey enough nuance so that the audience is curious to discover how he got that way. The stellar cast also includes Oscar winner Frances McDormand as the pregnant chancellor, Rip Torn as a successful author Tripp envies, the always interesting Robert Downey Jr. as Tripp’s editor, and the aforementioned Katie Holmes as a student rooming in Tripp’s house, which most middle-aged male professors would find convenient but Tripp seems to find intimidating.
The film was directed by Oscar nominated director (and Oscar winning screenwriter) Curtis Hansen, and adapted by Steven Kloves from a novel by Pulitzer prize winning author Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). These guys know writers and writing, so maybe that’s why the milieu of a writer’s conference taking place at Professor Tripp’s campus is so lovingly crafted. All of these characters take literature way too seriously (Tripp explains his relationship with the chancellor by saying she was addicted to words and that luckily he manufactured her drug of choice). There probably hasn’t been a film as adoringly immersed in the world of literati since The World According to Garp.
Wonder Boys cost a reported $35 million to film and took in $20 million at the box office in the U.S., $33 million world wide. When it was re-released in November of 2000 in order to maybe get some Oscar buzz, it never grossed more than $100,000 in any given week, despite an extensive ad campaign.
At least they tried. I thought it was the best film I saw in 2000, but I don’t get an Oscar vote.
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