Wonder Boys

After being so knocked-out a couple years ago by L. A. Confidential, which won director Curtis Hanson a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, everybody's been looking forward to his next movie. Well, I hate to sound like a broken record week after week this time of year, but when a filmmaker of such high profile releases a movie in February, it's not a good sign. Late winter is generally the season for cheap thrills and serendipitous surprises, not prefab blockbusters, especially when it comes to movies aimed at the over-20 audience.

Part of the problem with Wonder Boys is that, instead of too many cooks -- for a change it's nice to see a movie whose script was written by just one person (Steven Kloves, who wrote the memorable early Sean Penn/Nicolas Cage vehicle, Racing with the Moon) -- it's got too many ingredients. The central plot deals with novelist/academician Grady Tripp (an awfully middle-aged Michael Douglas), whose failure after an acclaimed first novel seven years earlier to find an ending for a followup now thousands of pages long has left him seeking inspiration in cannabis. But there are also substantial threads following various other critical-mass influences piling up in Grady's life the weekend the departure of his latest wife coincides with a much-vaunted local literary festival: a mysterious, suicidal student (Tobey Maguire, late of Cider House Rules) given to prodigious fabrications; another student (Katie Holmes) who rents a room from Grady while yearning to be more than just his well-written tenant; Grady's pregnant lover Sara (Frances McDormand), university chancellor married to a dean (Richard Thomas) who has a vicious blind pit bull and a Joe DiMaggio/Marilyn Monroe fetish; a chronically successful author/colleague (Rip Torn) named Q (not the one from "Star Trek" or the 007 movies); Grady's bisexual editor Terry "Crabs" Crabtree (Robert Downey, Jr., who has a bedroom scene but keeps his feet covered so you can't see the electronic parole anklet); and an insane car thief who looks like James Brown. And like a marinara sauce, if you put in that much stuff but don't give it time enough to set, the result tastes unfinished.

The cherubic Maguire comes out on top of this seriocomic battle royale, despite another laconic, sedate persona; he has a promising career ahead if he'll try something a little less comatose. But on the whole, Wonder Boys isn't much more memorable than Wonder Bread. It tries hard to be clever, but fails, just not miserably. C+

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