Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
When I came across Wonder Boys at a public library a few years ago, it was like it found me.
The cover didn’t look like a promising apocalyptic scene out of some dream world in the recesses of Christopher Nolan’s mind. In fact, it was packaged so humbly, you’d think the marketing team of Paramount Pictures, for some ironic reason, wanted their own movie to do badly.
The film’s premise sounds as unapologetically unmarketable as the cover, but there’s nothing more attractive to me than a movie that doesn’t care what Hollywood’s cult followers want.
Sometimes, there are movies that just resonate so well with your situation that it seems like it was made for you and you alone. This was one such movie.
Wonder Boys is a cathartic experience that won’t let you wallow in self-pity but, instead, encourages you to laugh at your shame. It reaches your fear, not through some artificially simulated emotions and some saccharine treatment to the subject of failure but through a nuanced script.
Enter Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas): Desperation incarnate. He penned a critically acclaimed novel, Arsonist’s Daughter, seven years ago and had been poised for that many years to churn out another. His colleagues, students and editor are anticipating for his big comeback. Grady, on the other hand, is anticipating his failure and has long braced himself for career suicide. For a chronically undecided person, Grady is uncharacteristically sure of his life story’s anticlimax.
His typewriter is his anthropomorphic therapist, receiving the brunt of his frustrations at the world and its dreams for him. In it, he writes a never-ending opus, a catalogue of beauty that, in its 2,000-plus pages, couldn’t, not unsurprisingly, gel together.
I get him. He skirts around the issue. He displays hesitations and indecisiveness like a tick. He plays the part of someone unperturbed by the underlying pity everyone feels for him as they facetiously praise his seven-year-old success, a success that’s clearly past its expiration date.
This movie tackles defeat in such a sprawling way, and this works in the film’s favour. Through Grady’s personal journey, we are taken through self-revelatory encounters with characters wandering through life themselves. As it happens, I was a wanderer in college when I found it.
The creative writing class Grady runs is a gem. It’s peopled with merciless critics who deal with their own insecurities about their talents by tearing their fellow students’ work to pieces. One of their favourite targets is James Leer (Toby Maguire), that weird kid who drowns his misery with even more poetic misery in the form of fiction. But James Leer is the most talented kid in Grady’s class, a fact that Grady doesn’t want to admit in the midst of his long-impending failure as a career novelist.
James is such an electrifying mystery. Eventually, Grady will find out that most of James’s life revealed to him that are as colorful as the stuff of fiction, is also as much a fabrication as the things he concocts as a writer.
Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), Grady’s mistress, is very much the opposite of self-assuredness that her romantic desperation is as final and musical as an Anne Sexton poem.
The atmosphere in this film is an emotionally sensitive one. The snowfall, reminiscent of Christmas, at the same time assaults our hero in a slush-splashing scene. In one rainy episode where Grady and Sara were forced to talk above a whisper to compete with the rain, Grady is wonderfully expressive. He looks cold, rained on but, for the first time, there’s a form of sunshine peeking in his weather-beaten eyes. The ironically incessant chatter of Word Fest’s erudite crowd also surrounds our hero, drowning him in exactly the kind of talk he wants to avoid; it’s a cacophony that turns into a symphony when Grady, with his newfound maturity, finally emerges from the bottom and swims against the current of chatter.
These themes, like Grady’s book, do not, at first, make a solid plot. In fact, the plot here is a shapeless one, and one directed by emotions. I find myself led seemingly aimlessly from one tragicomic scene to another in a car where the trunk “fits a big bag, a tuba, a dead dog and a garment bag almost perfectly.” That infamous trunk is more than just a punch line; it’s a microcosm of the film itself — the chaos of disparate elements and characters amusingly coming together and fitting in “almost perfectly” in the bigger picture.
What made the movie for me is atmosphere: the way Douglas shrugs off difficulties with sarcastic humour and indifference was great to watch throughout the film.
Well written piece!