Camden movies: Smart People directed by Noam Murro | Widowed Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is a cranky professor of literature whose once-brilliant career has gone off the rails.

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published: 15 May 2008

Dennis Quaid: not the most chipper fellow in town

Camden cinema | Smart People review| Noam Murro | Starring Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker

SMART PEOPLE
Directed by Noam Murro
Certificate 15

WIDOWED Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is a cranky professor of literature whose once-brilliant career has gone off the rails.
But he’s still able to cut lesser mortals down to size with a barbed quip or a biting one-liner, and has managed to alienate his son (Ashton Holmes) and create a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon between them.
To make home life even more fraught, he has turned his bright teenage daughter (Ellen Page, last seen as a pregnant teenager in the comedy hit Juno) into an acid-tongued, friendless over-achiever.
Life turns upside- down for the frosty egg-head when he suffers a seizure, and wakes up in hospital to find himself a different person, tempted into an affair with a former student (Sarah Jessica Parker) who is now a doctor.
The last thing the bearded academic wants is for his layabout brother (Thomas Hayden Church) to turn up unannounced at his front door at the height of his turmoil, low on cash and needing a place to stay.
As a result of all this, Lawrence is forced to reappraise his life, with varying consequences for himself and everyone around him.
This is serious stuff, and an absorbing study of a dysfunctional family, backed by some fine acting from a stellar cast.

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