Wonder Boys

This movie has been touted by secular critics as an artistic coup for Michael Douglas. Indeed, his performance is subtle and well-textured as he plays a college professor (Grady Tripp) who teaches creative writing and whose life is not going so well. Grady is having an affair with his chancellor (Frances McDormand), who is also the wife of his department chairman (Richard Thomas). She soon announces that she is pregnant. His own wife has left him, and Grady is unable to finish his second book, which is long in coming after his first successful publication. His publisher (Robert Downey Jr.) arrives in town demanding to see the manuscript, for his own professional success depends on it.

Compressed into a period of a few days, Grady has to face his own worth as a writer, as we learn that his unfinished manuscript is already well-over 1,000 pages long and he rightfully resists showing it to his anxious publisher. He also finds himself in a position as mentor and caretaker to one of his own students, James (Tobey Maguire) who is having personal problems—no apartment, no apparent family, and psychological problems. And when he learns that his lover is pregnant, he has to decide how or if he is going to make a commitment to her, whose husband seems to know nothing about the affair.

In the course of facing or solving these issues, Grady reaches into the phlegmatic resources of his soul for some strength. He reveals himself to be the proverbial professor who’s stuck in his little academic niche, where life is comfortable only because the problems have always been the same: female students enamored with him (whom he has to resist), an extramarital affair on campus, plenty of time to write and publish. His redeeming quality is that he realizes he is in trouble and that he has to do something, however inadequate. He has a spark of humanity as he tries to help his troubled student James with housing and James’ estranged parents. He has to deal with the pregnant lover and her irate husband, and his publisher is breathing down his neck after having arrived in town with a transvestite who dumps him. Grady’s quiet and safe world becomes a torture chamber with everything going wrong. There is some farcical humor when James shoots a dog that attacks Grady and then they put the dog in the trunk of a car which then gets stolen, and so forth.

Despite the funny moments, this is a movie that is ultimately empty and disappointing. There is implicit homosexuality, the remorseless adultery, and Grady’s addiction to marijuana. At the end, Grady may have demonstrated a touch of conscience and concern for those who are in his life, but the general outlook of the movie has a jaded world view. Nobody cares too much about anybody. And despite the fact that this role is a stretch for Michael Douglas and he does reflect the malaise that can beset a life in academia, the movie borders on forgettable. The plot is well-constructed, the acting is good. But from the Christian perspective, the characters are pitiful, bleak, even adolescent and the immorality reprobate. Not recommended.