Tagline: Sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn.
Smart People movie storyline. Lawrence Wethrehold is a widowed, acerbic and self-absorbed literature professor who has alienated his son and turned his daughter into an overachieving, friendless teen. He falls for Janet, one of his former students, while at the same time his ne’er-do-well brother unexpectedly shows up at this door, triggering in him the need to change and reconnect with his family before he can make any steps forward in his life.
Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) might be imperiously brilliant, monumentally self-possessed and an intellectual giant – but when it comes to solving the conundrums of love and family, he’s as downright flummoxed as the next guy. His collegiate son (Ashton Holmes) won’t confide in him, his teenaged daughter (Ellen Page) is an acid-tongued overachiever who follows all too closely in dad’s misery-loving footsteps, and his adopted, preposterously ne’er-do-well brother (Thomas Haden Church) has perfected the art of freeloading.
A widower who can’t seem to find passion in anything anymore, not even the Victorian Literature in which he’s an expert, it seems Lawrence is sleepwalking through a very stunted middle age. When his brother shows up for an extended stay at just about the same time as he accidentally encounters his former student Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), the circumstances cause him to stir from his deep, deep freeze, with often comical, sometimes heartbreaking, consequences for himself and everyone around him.
About The Genesis of Smart People
SMART PEOPLE is the story of an entire family coming-of-age, kicking and screaming the whole way. The head of the family, Lawrence Wetherhold, is having a colossal mid-life crisis. He’s a venerable professor who can’t connect with his students, a brilliant writer who can’t publish his book, an aloof father who can’t comprehend his equally smart children and a lonesome widower who can no longer remember the details of how love works.
Things are at a standstill in the Wetherhold household… until two events shatter the angstridden peace and change everything. First, Lawrence’s adopted brother Chuck – a perpetual, overgrown adolescent – comes back into his life, looking for a place to crash while he gets his life together for the thousandth time. And then, against all odds, Lawrence does the unthinkable: he falls in love. As chaos breaks out on all fronts, Lawrence’s brainy, blustering, well-armored defenses also began to break down – confronting him with the grouchy shadow of a man he has become and the parent, teacher and lover he once wanted to be.
The story of the Wetherholds first came to life in the mind of Mark Poirier, an acclaimed young American novelist and short story writer who is just starting to break into screenwriting. Poirier’s two critically praised novels, Goats and Modern Ranch Living, explored the humor and anguish hiding within the surreal fabric of modern life in the Southwestern U.S.
But with SMART PEOPLE, Poirier wanted to delve into another insular, quirk-filled world with which he is quite familiar: academia. (Poirier has both attended and taught writing at Bennington College, Johns Hopkins University and Stanford, among others.) It’s a realm that has been satirized and dissected in various ways throughout movie history – but Poirier was interested a different aspect of the academic universe: its family life and the volatile emotions and darkly funny situations that often hide behind the overblown self-importance and heady anxieties of the intellectual world. In the intellectually gifted Wetherholds he perceived a family at once funny and moving in their predicament of knowing so much – yet not really knowing one another at all.
The characters also cut close to the bone for Poirier. “When I was a kid, people used to call me `Old Man,’ because I was very sort of grouchy and unhappy and a lot like Lawrence,” he explains. “Vanessa, his daughter, is also sort of an extreme version of who I was in high school – someone who was achieving a lot, but for all the wrong reasons. And Lawrence’s son James and brother Chuck are the people I always wished I could be, you know, to be that cool and to dare to do what you really loved.”
Poirier’s screenplay soon attracted the devoted attention of leading producers Bridget Johnson, whose films include such major critical and box-office hits as Jerry Maguire and As Good As It Gets, and Michael Costigan, who broke into producing with Brokeback Mountain and this year executive produced American Gangster. They in turn sent the script to Noam Murro, a native-born Israeli and one of the ad world’s leading lights who had cut his creative teeth on award-winning spots for such companies as Nike and Adidas, and was named DGA Director of the Year in 2005. Murro was ready to break out into feature films, and searching for a story that would hit home, when SMART PEOPLE did just that.
It was the semi-sweet mix of the sardonic and the heartbreaking in the piece that really set it apart for Murro. “I liked that it was about very serious themes, yet it addressed them very unassumingly,” he continues.
“There’s a wonderful poignancy to these characters, but at the same time they can be painfully funny. It’s a story that invites you in without feeling too heavy. Although it’s about a family that never really woke up from grief, the story doesn’t take itself too seriously and, therefore, I think it allows you to get closer to some kind of truth. These aren’t perfect characters – they’re all quite damaged in various ways, but for me, that was a great place to start.”
Early meetings confirmed that Murro and the producers were on the same page. “Noam is extremely focused and really knows his own mind,” says Bridget Johnson. “We were always very confident that he would bring a unique visual style to the film, and that he would be great with the characters and the actors.”
Meanwhile, Mark Poirier was equally thrilled to hear that Murro was going to helm his story, having already encountered his work. “When I was teaching at Bennington College, I taught a course called `The Short Short Story’ and we looked at some of Noam’s ads and discussed how they are really like short films,” he recalls. “Now, I was very excited to be working with him.”
Murro and Poirier spent the next twelve months intensively collaborating on a new draft of the script, finding a very strong creative rapport. Meanwhile, Bruna Papandrea and Michael London of Groundswell Productions came on board. London, who had previously brought Rex Pickett’s novel Sideways to the screen in an Oscar-nominated production directed by Alexander Payne and who also produced the family-angst comedy The Family Stone, immediately responded to the story.
About The Music
The final touches were added to SMART PEOPLE by composer Nuno Bettencourt, a highly regarded guitarist who makes his debut as a composer on the film. Bruna Papandrea, a friend of Bettencourt’s, had given him a copy of the film and without even being asked, Bettencourt had found himself inspired to write some music. Later, the filmmakers listened to his cues and felt instantly that this was the right musical direction for the film. “Music is your emotional bed and I always felt that at the end of the day, the score needed to echo the interior humbleness of these characters and situations,” says Noam Murro. “Nuno got that straight off the bat.”
Bettencourt found his initial inspiration in the subtle details of the opening moments of the film. “There are all these sort of slouchy moments, with the way Lawrence walks, the way he parks his car and the way he can’t remember people’s names. It reminded me of `The Odd Couple’ in a way and I could already hear the music,” he says. “Of course, a dysfunctional family is something I always connect with and I definitely connected with this one.”
Rather than creating big, orchestral compositions, Bettencourt’s approach was more restrained and chamber-like, reflecting the characters. “I wanted to match the subtleties in the story telling with the music,” he explains. “There are only six main characters and most of the time there are only two or three of them in a scene. It hit me right away to follow a rule that there shouldn’t be more instruments than characters in any scene.”
He also determined that he would always work against the grain, contrasting the film’s moods with the music. “If the scene was heavy then I kept the music light or if there was a moment of romance I changed the tone and rocked it out a little,” he notes. “Just when things start to get a bit miserable, the key was to play it a bit funny, musically. Everybody knows that’s part of any family – that misery is often funny when you look back on it, and that’s there always love in there somewhere.”
Bettencourt also wrote several original songs for the film with his wife Suze Demarchi, a songwriter and former lead singer of an Australian band. “We experimented and strategically placed Suze’s and my original songs whenever we needed to lift some of the characters. I think the songs work really beautifully and play well lyrically and we had a great time doing it. It brought us closer.” Naturally, Bettencourt had some nerves about making his feature composing debut, but he remembers the day they were allayed. “Noam came by to hear the score and he had this horrible look on his face and he looked like he was crying at one point and I thought, my God, is it that bad? And then he got up and he kissed me,” recalls the musician. “And it turned out that he really loved it.”
Whether it was in the music, the design or the performances, Noam Murro was ultimately most focused on nailing the delicate but reverberating shifts that lie at the heart of SMART PEOPLE. He sums up: “It’s a story that constantly shimmers between drama and comedy, and hopefully, you wind up with a sense of having really seen both the laughter and sadness in these people, this one fragile family. In the end, that’s all you can really ask for.”
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
Smart People (2008)
Directed by: Noam Murro
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, Ellen Page, Ashton Holmes, Christine Lahti, Amanda Jane Cooper, Camille Mana, Aaron Bernard, Iva Jean Saraceni
Screenplay by: Mark Poirier
Production Design by: Patti Podesta
Cinematography by: Toby Irwin
Film Editing by: Robert Frazen, Yana Gorskaya
Costume Design by: Amy Westcott
Set Decoration by: Teresa Visinare
Art Direction by: Ron Mason
Music by: Nuno Bettencourt
MPAA Rating: R for language, brief teen drug and alcohol use and for some sexuality.
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: April 11, 2008
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