Thursday, May 15, 2008
"Wonder Boys" is still the best -- and most moving -- comedy of the year. Director Curtis Hanson and novelist Michael Chabon explain why Hollywood gave them a second chance to prove it.
Nov 10, 2000 | At a time when comedy rules the box office, the best comedy of the year opened in February, won rave reviews -- and disappeared. Its title is "Wonder Boys." Its story about a bumbling middle-aged author confronting and transcending faded glory gives the lie to the Fitzgerald quote "There are no second acts in American lives." In a rare move for a big studio, Paramount has given "Wonder Boys" a second act. The movie reopens in eight cities this week.
Curtis Hanson's first film since his much-honored "L.A. Confidential" is about lead characters who range in age from 20 to the mid-50s. But right now "Wonder Boys" is the most youthful comedy around. It's the most open in spirit, the most generous and bighearted.
The hero is a pot-smoking creative writing professor and one-time hot novelist (Michael Douglas) -- a head in over his head. On the weekend of a campus literary bash called WordFest, he must respond to a kaleidoscope of stress points. These include the departure of his latest wife; the pregnancy of his married lover (Frances McDormand); the erratic, possibly suicidal behavior of an enigmatic prize student (Tobey Maguire); the allure of another student (Katie Holmes) who boards in his house; and the visit of his bouncy but beleaguered editor (Robert Downey Jr.), who has been waiting for our hero's new novel to halt his own professional tailspin. The author, who suffers from the verbal runs, not writer's block, is currently on Page 2,611.
Along the way, he winds up with a dead dog on his hands and enjoys a succession of memorable brief encounters with characters ranging from a towering, tuba-toting transvestite to a pregnant drink slinger with the unforgettable name "Oola." In general, he receives an unsentimental, unconventional education about what it means to be a lover, friend and father figure. What we get, thanks to Hanson, his screenwriter, Steve Kloves, his superb cast and Michael Chabon's lyrical source novel, is an exhilarating blend of rumpled romance and off-kilter farce. It's a bildungsroman with hemp buds -- about men and women who slouch toward maturity in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
Pittsburgh in a wet winter, in the lens of cinematographer Dante Spinotti, becomes a fairy-tale location, fit not just for lowdown campus comedy but also for eerie musings in the tumbling lights and shadows of snowy evenings. As the characters experience pratfalls on their way to redemption, with a succession of singer-songwriters articulating their slapstick odysseys on the soundtrack (including Bob Dylan, who contributes a vibrant original song, "Things Have Changed"), Hanson and company achieve a fablelike combination of clarity and surprise. (That's what eluded Cameron Crowe in "Almost Famous," another critically lauded movie that harks back to the no-holds-barred filmmaking of the late '60s and early '70s.)
"Wonder Boys" is about characters doing what may be harder for contemporary Americans to do than anything else, as the events of these past few weeks illustrate: learning to make hard choices and stick by them. It succeeds because Hanson and Kloves committed to correct decisions early on, like making the comedy grow out of the characters and refusing to eliminate references to Genet or Thomas Babington Macaulay out of fear audiences might not get them. At the same time, they didn't use literary wit as a crutch.
Unfortunately, a year ago, Paramount made all the wrong moves. As Hanson told me over the phone last week, there had been "internal discussion" among Paramount's marketing and distribution strategists as well as Hanson and his powerful co-producer, Scott Rudin, about the opening date of "Wonder Boys." The various parties disagreed about whether to put the movie into theaters last Christmas, hold it as counterprogramming for the summer or hold it even longer -- until, well, now.
Paramount finally decided to open it in February, a week after the announcement of Academy Award nominations. The two front-runners for last year's Oscars turned out to be "American Beauty" and "The Cider House Rules," which were aimed at the same audience as "Wonder Boys." (Indeed, "The Cider House Rules" also starred Maguire.) Backed by stellar DreamWorks and Miramax publicity, these films had lots of box-office life left in them.
Still, the lackluster "Wonder Boys" campaign might have sunk the movie even if it hadn't squared off against such stiff competition. Faced with the challenge of promoting a multiflavored film with a cast of Oscar-winning veterans and up-and-comers, the Paramount team resorted to selling it as a star vehicle for Douglas -- a wacky comedy about a middle-aged guy who in the ads looked like either Michael J. Pollard (according to Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal) or Elmer Fudd (according to Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times). The trailers and TV commercial featured the dead dog, as if the film were a canine spinoff of the "Weekend at Bernie's" movies.
Within a couple of weeks, Hanson says, Paramount studio chief Sherry Lansing, "who championed this film from the beginning," and vice-chairman Rob Friedman, head of marketing and distribution, told him, "We could have done better by you." They soon began talking about pulling the movie back and holding it until this fall. "They took the extraordinary step," says Hanson, "of canceling all the ancillary stuff -- the video release and airplane and hotel showings -- because without canceling it there wouldn't be anything special about this reissue. Studios don't like to do that, because it adds up to a lot of money, and it's free money: They don't have to spend anything to get it."
More important, Paramount may now get it. With the moviemakers' input, the studio has created new publicity tools that bring the film's infectious warmth to the fore. The new trailer does feature two fleeting shots of the dog, but otherwise it takes a blessedly different approach, highlighting critical raves and rewarding each top-billed player with a moment in the spotlight. (It wisely includes a snatch of Dylan's resonating song.) The new poster and print ad follow suit. Their casual portraiture recalls the loose and amiable campaigns for Hal Ashby's '70s films (like "The Landlord," "The Last Detail" and "Shampoo") -- movies Hanson used as benchmarks, especially for the way they established an easy, nonjudgmental relationship between a movie's viewers and its characters.
Will the revamped publicity tools work wonders for this marvelous picture? Well, at least they won't hurt. But what may sell the movie now is the mysterious rightness of its timing. When I saw it with a handful of friends the week before the election, it felt even more refreshing than it did last February. In the frenzied final days of the presidential campaign, this movie offered two hours of undiluted enjoyment and sanity, a vision of America in which every character is given the right to be foolish, uproarious and touching, no matter his or her sexual orientation, race or creed. But "Wonder Boys" has more to offer than a neo-countercultural gestalt. It's about a guy who realizes that good intentions and warm fuzzies are not enough to fulfill a writer and a man. In his art as well as his life, he has to figure out his destination -- only then does he have a shot at being happy and productive en route.
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