Rating: 3 Pulses

Rated R

Smart People, another recent Sundance progeny picked up by Miramax, is not a movie for everyone.

In fact, if you don’t know what words like misanthropy and pedantic mean I wouldn’t bother going. A lot of this movie’s charm is wrapped up in quirky dialogue, peppered with SAT words, that carries a cast of intellectuals on the path to emotional intelligence, or at least past the misery they’ve allowed themselves to stagnate in.

Carnegie-Mellon professor of literature Dr. Lawrence Wetherhold (Quaid) is the kind of teacher students weed out of their schedules after checking their reputation online. He shuffles across campus under the weight of a perpetual grudge against the world since the death of his wife 10 years earlier, refuses to learn his students names, and has turned his daughter, Vanessa (Page), into a 17-year-old version of himself, jaded, pompous and unhappy with everything.

It’s an out-of-character role for Quaid, and I am almost positive he was wearing a partial fat suit for portions of the film. His rugged good looks make a romantic relationship with ER doctor and former student Janet Hartigan (Parker) at least somewhat plausible. Thank goodness they didn’t cast Nicholas Cage in this role.

Parker shines as Hartigan, her tousled blond hair and innate glamour are unrepressed by ER work, and after years of “Sex and the City” it doesn’t seem hard for her to portray a woman in a difficult relationship. Practice makes perfect. Janet is joined by Lawrence’s ner-do-well adopted brother, Chuck (Church), as the external forces exacting change upon our stodgy professor.

There’s not a lot of back story, the audience is dropped into the cast’s lives for a slice-of-life. You’ll find no flashbacks here, but the cast does a standup job of fleshing out their characters, minimizing the constraints of chronological story telling.

Smart People is quiet and clever, but it lacks the quirky nonchalance that makes off-beat drama-comedies into classics, embraced and much downloaded by disgruntled college students, not unlike Lawrence’s, across the world.

A signature sound wouldn’t have been out of place. Unfortunately this is no Little Miss Sunshine, and there is no Sufjan Stevens to add poignancy to our character’s distress. The score, composed by former Extreme lead guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, is unspectacular.

Still, I felt good walking out of Smart People. There is an underlying message of hope, although Murro, smartly, doesn’t browbeat his audience with the message.