A quarter of a century has passed since director Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys. As we re-evaluate the cinema of 2000, does it stand up to scrutiny?
This is the latest in AJ Black’s series of features on films released in the year 2000. He previously looked back at Wes Craven’s meta horror sequel, Scream 3.
Few rushed out to see Wonder Boys in cinemas. Granted, it was the top earning movie of its opening weekend, but the competition was slim: John Frankenheimer’s Reindeer Games, a film which itself should probably have fared better given it featured Ben Affleck and rising star, Charlize Theron. Wonder Boys did so poorly that Paramount re-released the film later in the year 2000. The results were much the same.
Part of the reason Wonder Boys bombed, analysts suggested, was because Paramount simply had no idea how to market it. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times suggested that the poster made Michael Douglas look like Elmer Fudd. Douglas, however, wasn’t known to audiences as an actor who played characters like Wonder Boys’ middle-aged, middle-class literature professor Grady Tripp. Douglas was more closely associated with roles like Romancing The Stone, Wall Street or Basic Instinct. Wonder Boys saw Douglas wandering into waters plumbed to great acclaim by the (now-disgraced) Kevin Spacey in the Oscar-winning American Beauty (1999).
A cynic might suggest Wonder Boys is cashing in on the existential malaise of the privileged white male at a point of powerful social and cultural change, a new millennium that, as Fight Club suggested in 1999, offered no outlet for the rage and sadness built into the masculine American psyche. And, arguably, Wonder Boys benefited from the success of these and helped get Hanson’s film the green light, but Wonder Boys comes from prestigious source material. It’s the second novel of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, front-lined by a Hollywood star in Douglas, supported by strong character actors, and overseen by director Curtis Hanson, fresh off L.A. Confidential, one of the best films of the previous decade.
So why didn’t Wonder Boys capture a great deal of cinematic wonder?
You can’t easily pigeonhole what the film is, for one thing. Critic Michael Sragow described it as “a contemporary screwball comedy-drama with a mellow emotional tang.” To an extent, Chabon’s story is ‘a couple of days in the life’ of Tripp, a tenured professor who never quite recovered from the unexpected success of his first novel, Arsonists Daughter, a book he feels something of a fraud for writing, and is unsure as to how he pulled it off. Feted, adored by some, including Tobey Maguire’s charge James Leer, it was a book Tripp singularly failed to live up to in subsequent years.
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Wonder Boys, then, is about an educated man of privilege caught in an existential funk about his talents as a writer, which leads to the off-screen breakdown of his long-term marriage. He’s been having an affair with the Dean of his university’s wife, Sara (played by an underwritten Frances McDormand), who has also gotten pregnant. He also chooses to sleep with his infatuated pupil, Hannah (a fresh-faced Katie Holmes), while attempting to write a second book which eludes him.
It’s a hard sell, even for someone as innately charming as Douglas. If you’re thinking this all sounds a lot like the David Duchovny-starring series Californication, which ran from 2007 to 2013, you’d be right. Creator Tom Kapinos must have been inspired by Wonder Boys; the third season of Californication essentially repeats the plot of the film for Duchovny’s Hank Moody, with a few variations.
In both of those examples, the central characters are designed to be appealing based on their hapless vulnerability. Grady’s voiceover drapes through Wonder Boys, providing the film an inner monologue in a similar manner to Leonardo DiCaprio’s thrill seeker Richard in The Beach, and in both examples it’s a technique designed to draw us into the thought processes of characters who were likely more diverse and sympathetic in the source novel, but in practice comes across as indulgent.
As Hank in Californication consistently screws up his chance of having a traditional loving family because of his philandering and other indulgences, so Grady is assumed to have allowed his marriage to fall apart because of his inaction. Hannah at one point cuts to this in analysing a second book he does write: “And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it’s… very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone’s horses, and the dental records, and so on. I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all”.
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The problem with a central character like Tripp is that his inertia slows down the film itself.
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Hanson doesn’t try and replicate the haunting, caustic tone of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, even if the relationship between Grady and Maguire’s James is remarkably similar to Spacey and Wes Bentley’s dynamic in that movie. He instead opts for a softer, knockabout comedic tone in places. Wonder Boys feels akin to a 1970s character piece, with Douglas as a shambolic hero in a world of literary elitism and success in an affluent part of Pittsburgh (a creative version of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, say). He drifts through a film of which the entire point is to provide him purpose.
“Why did you keep writing this book if you didn’t even know what it was about?” he’s asked at one point.
“I couldn’t stop,” Grady replies.
Yet Wonder Boys does stop in places, slowing almost to a crawl, as Steve Kloves’ adapted screenplay attempts to use James’s personal anguish as a budding writer as a means of reflecting Grady’s own jaded feelings of inadequacy as a writer, husband and potentially now a father. American Beauty tapped the same well with a great deal more razor-edged pathos, landing a punch Wonder Boys isn’t capable of. It’s also a great deal less angry than Fight Club.
It feels like a film trapped in limbo, neither relevant nor entirely old hat by 2000, yet one that feels out of step and slightly perverse today (though certain moments in American Beauty also feel creepy in retrospect). It again seems to be perfectly fine, as Californication later was, with Grady and Hannah’s implied sexual relationship. It’s a film that wants us to root for Grady’s rediscovery when at the same time it’s difficult to feel sorry for or even like him, given the liberal, entitled East Coast world he inhabits.
There’s a distinct feeling that Wonder Boys should be a better film than it is, and no doubt Chabon’s novel far more successfully characterises the existential moment faced by Grady Tripp. But even Hanson’s solid direction and Douglas’ admittedly compelling, offbeat performance, can’t save Wonder Boys from a level of disappointment. By the time the film discovers itself, it’s too little, too late.
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