skin deep
Professor Tripp’s (Michael Douglas) life is complicated, complicated enough that it takes a solid third of Wonder Boys just to get the guy properly introduced. We’re talking real-time here, too, a 2 Days in the Valley kind of schedule, just up in that New England rain. And, because he’s a writer, of course he gets to narrate things, voice-over the otherwise quiet patches, explain what he’s doing here or there, why, all that kind of exposition you would expect if you were reading instead of watching. Is Wonder Boys one of his stories, though, a little autobiography? Was Stand By Me? Some endings are obligatory. All the same, this doesn’t mean you can tell how everything’s going to work out, either.
It’s complicated, you see: not only does Tripp’s wife leave him in the moments before Wonder Boys begins, but later that day he finds out his mistress (Frances McDormand) the chancellor is pregnant. And no, though he is an English teacher, director Curtis Hanson nevertheless avoids all the missed period jokes. There’s too much else going on for little stuff like that, not the least of which is what the trailer gives away–a dead dog (Po, not Bernie, though they do lug the corpse around for a while). And the shooter of that dog, one James Leer (Tobey Maguire), the most issue-laden writer in Tripp’s graduate fiction workshop, trying to pull off some sadistic mix of Tennessee Williams and Sid Vicious. As if all this wasn’t enough, Tripp’s editor (Robert Downey Jr., still playing Julian, only with a job now) is in town for the university’s ‘Wordfest,’ which is just an excuse to get a peek at Tripp’s top-secret seven-year novel, which, as Tripp can’t seem to come to stopping place, is spooling out to some ridiculously Proustian length.
All of which means that, as the implicit agreement in any movie is to have everything wrapped up in about two hours, Tripp has his hands full here. And he’s already pinching a joint practically every other scene, so the juggling only gets more and more difficult. It is comical to watch, though, which is really what Wonder Boys is all about–laughing at this guy’s bad luck and his particularly mellow way of articulating it all. As if everything that’s happening to him is already a story, and he’s already cued in that he’s just a character.
In a movie about writers and writing, too, Michael Chabon/Steven Cloves would have been remiss not to do the obvious–make Tripp’s completing that novel dependant upon solving all these crises he’s involved in. That kind of pairing works in every movie about sports, anyway, and if you don’t think writing is enough like a sport to qualify for the same treatment, well, then maybe it’s best to just digest Wonder Boys as some kind of an inverse of DOA, which had a similar publish or perish imperative, only the stakes there were, if not higher, at least more immediate.
Another way to make sense of Wonder Boys is to simply take the cues it gives us: as it starts out in the fiction workshop, and a lot of the exposition is voiced-over (as opposed to visually narrated), why not just let the whole thing be a story in process, with Tripp as the main character? And what’s supposed to happen to a story in workshop? All the excess gets removed. As pertains to Tripp, all the complication get uncomplicated, his life gets ‘edited’ down to something manageable. But of course he’s the only one who can do that. Does it involve Marilyn Monroe and some unlikely character he practically writes into existence in a smoky bar? Of course it does. That’s part of what makes Wonder Boys so great. Too often comedy self-destructs under its own pressure to be funny. Not Wonder Boys. It just goes to prove that a movie doesn’t have to be as quirky or introspective as Rushmoore or as over-the-top as Skin Deep to entertain. There is a middle ground, and Wonder Boys is right there. It never misses a beat.