Campus Shooting
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Campus Shooting An academic comedy featuring Prof. Dennis Quaid. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Beware any movie with a professor in it. From time immemorial, the cinema has tripped itself up in its...
...It is very diffi cult for a defi antly antiintellectual medium like the cinema to capture what is interesting about someone who spends much of his life living inside his own head...
...In A Change of Seasons (1980), Anthony Hopkins is a professor at Williams having a fl ing with a student played by Bo Derek...
...Playing someone who holds the world to impossible standards of intellectual attainment, Quaid is lost...
...Finally, there is the movie that properly portrays an academic as a fool, charlatan, and lunatic all at once— which is to say, Horse Feathers (1932), with Groucho Marx as Professor Wagstaff, who declares in the midst of his investiture as president of Huxley College, “Whatever it is, I’m against it...
...The only time a movie about a professor is any good is when the academic in question is portrayed either as a fool or charlatan or lunatic...
...But the interesting and literate screenplay by Mark Jude Poirier is undone by its central performance...
...Smart People is the rare movie about a professor that gets the details of campus life right, and for that it deserves some credit...
...But Doc,” our academic would be asked, “isn’t that just superstitious mumbo jumbo...
...But as an example of what can happen in a classroom when an innocent kid comes face-to-face with a tenured psychotic, it is all too real...
...In Back to School (1986), a history professor played by the incendiary comic Sam Kinison asks his students to summarize one of “the easiest confl icts to understand,” the Vietnam war, and screeches like a banshee at one of them who gives a well-informed answer...
...We know Wetherhold is a troubled man because his bitter and clever daughter (Ellen Page) is a Young Republican with a photograph of Ronald Reagan on her wall...
...The scene is implausible, largely because Kinison plays the professor as a rightwing Vietnam veteran, of whom there are perhaps three in all of real-world academia...
...Dick Powell plays Professor Bartlow, who has written a historical novel that becomes a surprise bestseller...
...Unless that intellectual is Groucho Marx...
...It was even worse on those occasions when Hollywood would attempt a sophisticated portrait of a college campus—like The Bad and the Beautiful, a ridiculous movie that was highly regarded upon its release in 1952...
...In contrast to the delightful Chuck, Professor Wetherhold is supposed to come across as a “pompous windbag,” in the words of his girlfriend, a shockingly unpleasant emergency-room doctor played by Sarah Jessica Parker (who is, literally, 15 years too old for the part...
...Smart People is about how intelligence is no substitute for good manners, common sense, and a sunny disposition...
...But it’s just no use, this occasional effort by earnest fi lmmakers to offer a portrait of the life of an intellectual on celluloid...
...You can’t blame moviemakers, really...
...The latest casualty is Smart People, a movie in which Dennis Quaid plays a fearsomely highbrow English professor...
...But Quaid just doesn’t have windbaggery in him...
...From time immemorial, the cinema has tripped itself up in its efforts to offer a minimally believable portrait of an academic...
...No matter what it is or who commenced it, I’m against it...
...Yes, you read that right: Dennis Quaid plays a fearsomely highbrow English professor...
...You’re a monster,” she is informed by Wetherhold’s deadpan, ne’er-do-well brother Chuck, and every word this man of the people speaks is the unvarnished truth in Smart People...
...Whereupon the sage would draw upon his pipe and, exhaling smoke, reply, “Ah, detective, most superstitions have their basis in actual fact...
...They make love in a hot tub, a device known only to Californians at the time...
...Chuck reads the New York Review of Books for pleasure, and he smokes pot, so he’s a saint...
...Word by word and scene by scene, the character played by Quaid—Professor Wetherhold of Carnegie Mellon— is a well-etched version of every student’s worst nightmare...
...This is on a par with Jessica Simpson playing Madame Curie...
...he is too amiable and borderline dopey for it...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...At Bartlow’s college, boys walk around in raccoon coats, everybody puffs on a Meerschaum, and people say things like, “So I hope to see you later to discuss that Shakespeare sonnet...
...I expect the number of Jacuzzis in use in northwestern Massachusetts in 1980 was zero...
...In the golden age of cinema, an on-screen professor was usually a bearded wise man who informed a skeptical cop or detective that, yes, it was actually quite possible for a mummy to be reanimated...
...Quaid can be a vibrant actor, but his signal quality is his commanding physical presence...
...In National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), an all-too-groovy literature prof smokes pot with his students, steals the girlfriend of one of them, and reports with a devilish smile that his own novel is a “piece of s...
...In 1930’s The Blue Angel, a sheltered teacher in Weimar Germany becomes obsessed, humiliated, and fi nally unmanned by a cabaret chanteuse—marking it as, perhaps, the best fi lm ever made about a sadomasochistic German academician...
Vol. 13 • April 2008 • No. 31
