Put THIS on your poster!
It’s held as an argument of fact that writers, in general, make boring subjects for movies. The act of writing is so largely internal that the ultra-literal medium of film invariably sells the topic short. So goes the wisdom.
This is not a piece of wisdom I agree with.
Yes, as with any apologia I hatch about writers and writing, I’m biased. If I didn’t find there to be compelling seeds of drama in a writer’s life, then I would have become an archaeologist or something. A lot of people don’t give a shit about the written word, so to each his own. But if you’re one of the sight-unseen objectors to cinematic writers, I strongly suggest you give a rainy afternoon’s chance to Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys.
It’s little surprise that Wonder Boys came out as so authentic an expression of the writer’s heroic struggles; it’s the product not only of the fabulous novelist Michael Chabon but also phenomenally gifted screenwriter Steve Kloves. Kloves may not have been met with the lucre of his Harry Potter paychecks for his sublime adaptation of Wonder Boys, but if nothing else it will reserve him an extra serene state of nirvana in the screenwriter’s afterlife.
Despite stellar reviews, an Oscar-decorated director and a recognizable cast, Wonder Boys sunk without trace at the box office on its initial release. So astounding was its underperformance that Hanson and producer Scott Rudin negotiated for a re-release in the thick of Oscar season, confident that a new marketing push was all the film needed to catch fire. Regrettably, they were mistaken.
Excuses have been lobbed for the popular indifference to the film (most vocally, an atypically un-sexy Michael Douglas), but a good number of people threw up their arms with a simple generalization: people don’t want to see writers at the movies.
Of course, Shakespeare in Love was a mega-hit and Best Picture only a few years prior, but the writer in that film was a) a dashing young lover and b) far and away the English language’s most famous practitioner. So the generalizers qualified just a bit: people don’t want to see ordinary looking, run-of-the-mill writers at the movies.
If you’re a writer and your name ain’t Shakespeare, you don’t belong on a movie poster.
And so the people missed out on Wonder Boys. They went on saying Michael Douglas plays the same character in every movie, that Tobey Maguire is a one-trick pony, that Katie Holmes should have hung ‘em up at nineteen. But Wonder Boys is meaningful to me for reasons far more powerful than its overturning a bunch of popular misapprehensions.
And here’s where I ought to admit that I was never the biggest fan of the original Spider-Man pictures. I thought they were silly, too light to be dark, too dark to be light. And in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, which did everything they were trying to do a thousand times better, they look positively facile. I know a lot of people are up in arms about the re-boot due out next year, but I’m one of the ones privately hopeful. Let Andrew Garfield have Spider-Man, Tobey; James Leer is yours, once and always.
James Leer is the college-aged writer played astonishingly well by Tobey in Wonder Boys. But he’s more than that. James Leer is artistic genius at its embryonic stage, a bundle of tics and passions just thirsting to be channeled into their fullest potential. I see the movie today – I see a young writer moping around a snowy northeast campus as an outsider, living only for his writing, crying out on the inside to be heard when all he can muster on the outside is a whimper – and it’s more telling than a looking glass.
It’s like my American Pie. That supposed obsession eighteen-year old boys are supposed to have about getting laid? Yeah, I never had that. For me, the much more immediate concern was getting words down on paper.
Wonder Boys is not a “dark” film on the order of Hanson’s follow-up 8 Mile, although Tobey’s character bears a surprisingly strong resemblance to the autobiographical rap prodigy portrayed by Eminem. The kids in both movies are loners, wanderers in territories unwelcome. They cling to their natural gifts as an outlet from a harsh world and a callous family. Tobey never gets a gun shoved in his face, but he harbors many of the same demons as his “Lose Yourself” counterpart.
(Given 8 Mile‘s financial success, it looks like we need yet another amendment to the no-writer rule: a writer character opens a movie if he’s Shakespeare or if he sets his writings to a hip-hop beat).
But Wonder Boys has more up its sleeve than simply the young writer genius. In fact, this vibrant and unforgettable character is not even our lead. The real touch of genius in this story is to juxtapose an emerging talent with a subsiding one – that is, to pit a brimming newbie against a jaded burnout.
Michael Douglas’ Grady Tripp is himself blocked, and in the process of writing an unpublishable anthill of a novel. He regards his mentee with such pity (because he’s seen the darker days a writer faces, and wishes better for the kid), such jealousy (because he knows in his heart that his pupil is his superior), and such gratitude (for the simple pleasure of interacting with genius at this young stage) that just thinking about their scenes together puts a smile on my face and a twinge in my heart.
There’s a dash of so many famous duos in here: Butch and Sundance, Salieri and Mozart, Vito and Michael, Woody and Buzz, Obi-Wan and Luke. Familiar notes, different music – if you know what I mean. And yet it’s not light-sabers Grady and James wield. It’s not .44 Colts, and it’s not spider webs.
It’s manuscripts. And apparently, that makes all the difference.
