Wonder Boys
I’ve thought about Curtis Hanson’s “Wonder Boys” quite a bit over the years. The primary reason for that was that it was the last movie my grandfather and I saw in theatres together before he died in 2000. I remembered loving it when we watched it, but I’ve wanted to revisit it because I couldn’t quite remember why I loved it. Now that I’ve seen it again, I think I love it more now, and in a much deeper way than I did then. It’s not weird to think this movie spoke to me when I was 22 years old, but it makes all the sense in the world that I does as I get ready to turn 41. Given my life’s trajectory, it’s almost autobiography, at times.
This is the last of a run of three films Hanson made in succession that showcase his talents as a storyteller, in my opinion. I will always go to bat for his whitewater rafting thriller with Meryl Streep, “The River Wild,” and his 1997 crime thriller “L.A. Confidential” remains one of the great films to lose Best Picture. Those films have firm places in my memory, and now it is time for “Wonder Boys” to take its place alongside them. It might even surpass them. Hanson is directing this adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel from a screenplay by Steve Kloves, who would- a year later- cement his legacy with his adaptations of most of the “Harry Potter” books in that franchise, but “Wonder Boys” is what put Kloves on my radar, and his work here is subtle, funny and affecting as Hanson follows Grady Tripp through a weekend that will change his life forever.
Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is a literary professor and an acclaimed novelist- his first book was a sensation, and he has been working on a follow-up for seven years. He’s still working on it 2600 pages later, and at his university’s annual literary gathering, his editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), is prepared for a full-court press against Grady to try and get a look at what he’s come up with. That barely scratches the top 5 of Grady’s issues he’s dealing with this weekend, though. His wife has left him again, and his girlfriend- the university’s chancellor, Sarah (Frances McDormond)- has told him she’s pregnant with their baby. He has a student staying in his house (Hannah, played by Katie Holmes), and another student (James, played by Tobey Maguire) is about to upend his weekend with a dead dog and a stolen Marilyn Monroe jacket, along with a book of his own that Terry thinks has potential. No wonder Grady needs weed all the time.
This basic concept of a story has been done many times, many ways, over the years. Whether it’s Fellini’s “8 1/2” or Charlie Kaufman’s script for “Adaptation.” or Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” or Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” the story of an artist struggling with his art, and his life, is a popular conceit for writers and filmmakers, and an easy way for them to get their own personal baggage out in the open. The great ones- and all of those are great- find a way to engage the rest of us in the process, and Hanson’s film does exactly that because of the way he has cast the film. You can have mixed feelings about Michael Douglas as an individual, and as a screen presence, but you feel like you’re watching him open up about his own struggles in the role of Grady Tripp. Limping around with an unshaven look, in a pink bathrobe he works in, there’s something about the actor’s work in this film that has always felt more personal than his typical performance, and you can see why he would be drawn to it. This is almost an inverse to the cocky, but fucked up, persona he was known for in movies like “Basic Instinct,” “The Game” and “Fatal Attraction,” and he’s relishing not only digging into Kloves’s screenplay, but sparring with the actors he is working opposite.
If you want to see the cache Hanson had with actors, all you have to do is look at this main cast, which is chock-full of great actors around Douglas. As James, Maguire gives one of his best performances, moving from the dark “tortured writer’s” mentality we meet him in when he is in class to opening up more with Grady, to even having some fun when the two are on the road together. This is a complicated role because a lot of it comes from the idea of James being a natural storyteller, and how that comes through. As Terry, this was Robert Downey Jr. in his halfway point before he really managed to turn his life around in the latter half of the decade, and he has great chemistry with Douglas and Maguire, but also feels very natural with Antonia, the transvestite he gets off the plane with when he arrives. This trio spends a lot of the film together, and as a Marvel fan, I can’t believe I never thought of the fact that we see Hank Pym, Tony Stark and Peter Parker Mark I in the same film together, in actually a similar dynamic that the characters exist in the MCU in. That kind of blows my mind, and adds a dimension to this film that is kind of surreal now. While that is the dynamic of characters that drives the narrative, it’s the two, key women in Grady’s life that add the big emotional meat on this film’s bones. As Sarah, McDormond is as great as she’s ever been, dealing with a dramatic change in their relationship with strength and good humor while also trying to push Grady into a point of taking more responsibility in his life. And as Hannah, this was the first time outside of “Dawson’s Creek” that you felt like Katie Holmes was more than just a pretty face. Late in the movie, we see that she has started to read Grady’s tome of a novel, and the insights she gets from it are painful for Grady to hear, but important for him to make the choices he makes afterwards, because up to this point, he hasn’t been making smart choices, and he’s lost focus of not just his talents as a writer, but as a human being.
My grandfather passed away 18 years ago on the day this is being written. One of the ways I tried to cope and work through my emotions about his passing, and the journey I took in doing so, was to write a piece that was a musical representation of my feelings during that 5 month span leading up to his death on July 29, 2000. It was bold and structurally compelling, but it was also chaotic and dense. I never finished it in my initial pass in 2001. It wouldn’t be until a few years later, when I had gotten my musical voice more under me, that I tried again, and the result was more focused, and in keeping with the composer I had become. This is where “Wonder Boys” really resonates with me stronger than it did then. Grady is unable to see the clearing through the brush that is his life. He has a lot of things on his mind, and needs to get his mind straight in more ways than one. This weekend is about doing that for him, and we all have those moments where either one moment, or a series of moments, jolt us into realizing a change is in order. Even after I found my focus as a composer, I was still a couple of years away from the moment Grady finds himself at here. As with Grady, when I hit that moment, I came out better, and more sure of what was important to me in the long run. And like Grady, it took a little self-destruction to get there.
