Smart People thinks it’s an intelligent indie drama for grown-ups, much in the manner of The Squid and the Whale and In the Bedroom. Set in the self-regarding world of American academia, it has a veneer of intellectualism - characters talk about postmodernism and send poems to The New Yorker - but is never as smart as it should be. It’s just another story of a dysfunctional American family. Tolstoy was wrong. It’s not all happy families that are the same, it’s the unhappy ones that look similar - at least in films like this.

This fractured family is headed by Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), a bearded Eng Lit professor who has lost interest in teaching and his students. Recently widowed, Lawrence walks around in a daze of self-pity. Unable to connect with his students, his family or himself, he is a seething mass of indifference and irritation who broods and barks at the world. He lives with his clever 17-year-old daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page, in her first postJuno role), his son, James (Ashton Holmes), who wants to be a poet, and his freeloading slacker brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church).

Lawrence’s life as a grouch potato is challenged when, following an accident, he is treated by Dr Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former student of his who once had a crush on him. They start to date and the plot revolves around the question: will the old curmudgeon let her love bring him back to life?

Smart People wants to be funny and sad and full of sharp observations, but Mark Poirier’s screenplay is just not up to the task. Its premise is that here are these incredibly smart people who are rather stupid when it comes to living. But Poirier fails to convince us that these people are smart. Lawrence is clearly a mediocre academic whose only distinguishing feature is his pretentiousness. Are we to assume he is clever simply because he’s a professor? Only once does Lawrence quote from a writer; in real life, such people do it all the time. Martin Amis can’t get a sentence out without name-checking Saul Bellow.

It’s the dramatic core of the film, however, that is so disappointing. This is the overfamiliar tale of a family who no longer talk to each other. And to explain Lawrence’s emotional meltdown as the result of losing his wife is just too easy and uninteresting. Ultimately, Smart People rests on our feelings about Lawrence. We have to care that he connects with Janet. That isn’t easy. He is shown to be a “pompous windbag”, as Janet calls him, and a self-centred egomaniac, which is fine. But Poirier forgets to give him some redeeming quality – charm, kindness or brilliance. You can’t imagine why any woman would be interested in this boring, self-absorbed man.

Quaid’s performance doesn’t help us to like his character, either. Michael Caine did a much better embittered-professor type in Educating Rita. What Caine caught was the terrible self-loathing of such men; Quaid, with that smirk of his, instead oozes self-satisfaction. Page’s Vanessa has a precocious world-weariness and waspish tongue that are similar to Juno’s, but her character is just another uptight young Republican bitch who needs to let her moral guard down, smoke some dope and get drunk - which she does with her Uncle Chuck.

Church gives the most enjoyable performance in the film, but this is essentially a rerun of Jack, the middle-aged teenager he played in Sideways.

As for Parker, shorn of her Sex and the City wardrobe, she looks like a cross between Madonna and Mr Punch, and has little in the way of screen presence. In the dramatic confrontations with Lawrence, she never delivers the emotional punch the film badly needs. For that, the director, Noam Murro, is to blame. He never trusts his actors or cinematographer to register the mood of a scene, opting instead for constant use of incidental guitar music and melancholic songs to do it for them.

15, 95 mins

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