Echoes of Michael Douglas’s creatively mired professor from Wonder Boys and Paul Giamatti’s raging midlife crisis in Sideways are obvious in Dennis Quaid’s furiously self-important academic in Smart People. Lawrence Wetherhold is widowed and increasingly dislocated from the rest of humanity. His poet son can’t talk to him; his aggressively intellectual, right-wing daughter (Ellen Page) encourages his worst superiority tendencies.

But Lawrence finds his cantankerous certainties undermined when two new people arrive in his life. One is a former student (Sarah Jessica Parker), now a doctor, who still nurses a crush on her ex-professor. The other is his ageing slacker stepbrother (Thomas Haden Church), who exists in a cloud of dope smoke and excuses but seems better adjusted than any of the other characters.

Although the individual elements are promising – a solid cast and a screenplay by the acclaimed novelist Mark Poirier – the story feels too contrived to engage. Page’s character’s supposed crush on her uncle is unconvincing; Parker’s love interest is too mopey and hard-done-by convincingly to offer Lawrence a means of redeeming himself. And the final scene, a montage of these prickly misfits bonding joyfully over a pair of newborn infants, feels as if it belongs in a different film.

15, 94mins

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