Paramount Pictures tried its hardest to make Wonder Boys<\/em> a success. Everything seemed right: L.A. Confidential<\/em> Academy Award winner Curtis Hanson was directing an adaptation of acclaimed novelist Michael Chabon\u2019s same-named novel. Established stars Douglas and McDormand were sharing the screen with reformed bad boy Downey and up-and-comers Maguire and Holmes. The soundtrack was a veritable classic-rock orgy of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and John Lennon. After the film bombed at the box office with a February 2000 release date, Paramount re-released it in November in a move Entertainment Weekly<\/em> called<\/a> \u201cnearly unheard of\u201d: \u201cParamount\u2019s abiding faith in the film \u2026 prompted them to admit to and revise marketing mistakes, including a new ad campaign (potential cost: $10 million) and the release date it should have had in the first place.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Admirable! But not fully successful: While Wonder Boys<\/em> (streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu as of Jan. 1) garnered a few Academy Award nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing, and Bob Dylan won a Best Original Song award for the film\u2019s opening track \u201cThings Have Changed\u201d) and ended up on various critics\u2019 best-of lists, it never made back its $55 million budget. As film critic Sean Burns notes<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s somehow fitting that Wonder Boys<\/em> managed to flop twice, as the movie is practically a valentine to failure \u2014 a warmly humane and often side-splittingly funny exploration of underperforming against expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Douglas remained a champion of the film\u2014hosting a 2018 screening<\/a> of it at Massachusetts\u2019s legendary Coolidge Corner Theatre, during which he praised the film\u2019s \u201cgreat writing\u201d by Steve Kloves\u2014and when Hanson passed in 2016, many obituaries, including Stephen Dalton\u2019s at The Hollywood Reporter<\/em><\/a>, said the film \u201cproved Hanson was no one-hit wonder boy himself.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n That exuberantly supported but widely underseen vibe fits Wonder Boys<\/em>, a film that explores the strange events of one weekend at an unnamed Pittsburgh university and that asks whether we\u2019ll recognize our own downswing while we\u2019re in it. Would we see the mistakes we\u2019re making, or the lies we\u2019re being told, or the role we\u2019re serving in someone else\u2019s story, while those things are happening? Or are we unable to break out of a certain cycle and deviate from a certain path? \u201cCouldn\u2019t stop,\u201d literature professor Grady Tripp (Douglas) says when someone asks of his 2,611-page, still-unfinished novel, \u201cWhy were you writing?\u201d But every story has a beginning, and every story has an end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wonder Boys<\/em> begins during a writing workshop, the kind of round-robin-style format any creative writing or humanities graduate student will recognize: the sense of laying yourself bare by sharing your work, the courage it takes to receive feedback with which you might not agree, and the acknowledgement that what you wrote might, in fact, need editing, improvement, or reassessment. So many of the details of Hanson\u2019s world-building, Kloves\u2019s script, and Jeannine Oppewall\u2019s production design make real the utterly unique rhythms of campus life, the fluid boundaries between professors and students, and the idea of college as a place of reinvention. The casualness with which students like Hannah (Holmes) and James (Maguire) address Professor Tripp, with their knowledge of the details of his marriage, the status of his incomplete novel after the resounding success of his preceding work, The Arsonist\u2019s Daughter<\/em>, his constant marijuana smoking, and his push-pull relationship with his editor, Terry Crabtree (Downey). Tripp\u2019s openness with them about his wife having recently left him, the demands of finishing his book, and the inadequacy he feels compared with other authors who arrive on campus for the university\u2019s annual Wordfest event. The intimacy with which they all share space\u2014Hannah rents a room in Tripp\u2019s house; James is always hanging around\u2014and the sense that in their shared artistic ambition, they\u2019re all equals, too. (Cinematographer Dante Spinotti\u2019s recurring use of split diopter shots that equate Tripp and James and James and Hannah within the frame adds to that atmosphere.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the nature of a college campus is that one, usually younger, generation arrives, moves through it, and then leaves it behind, while another, usually older, cadre of professors and administrators stays still, and that dichotomy has manifested in Tripp as a kind of listlessness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wonder Boys<\/em> gives you the sense that Tripp hasn\u2019t made a true decision of his own in a long time, and that for all the guidance he offers his students, for all the indulgence he provides to James\u2019s increasingly complex and contradictory stories about his childhood, and for all the kindness with which he rebuffs Hannah\u2019s advances, he\u2019s just floating along. He goes to Wordfest every year and stands by as his boss, the head of the English department, Walter Gaskell (Richard Thomas), praises visiting author after visiting author. He puts on his ratty pink robe, sits at his typewriter, and types away some before locking his meandering pages in a file cabinet. He arranges secret rendezvous with Sara Gaskell (McDormand), the university chancellor and Walter\u2019s wife, with whom he\u2019s been having an affair. He is constantly smoking a joint, pulling one out of his pocket or fetching one from the glove compartment of his car\u2014the weed as ubiquitous as the red cowboy boots Hannah always wears, or the many overdue library books and VHS movies in James\u2019s knapsack, or the unending line of men and women Terry sleeps with and then casts aside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tripp has become a predictable man. But when Sara tells him that she\u2019s pregnant, he\u2019s finally jarred out of the holding pattern that becomes his life, setting off an un<\/em>predictably peculiar series of events. In the 25 years that have passed since Chabon\u2019s novel was published, and the 20 years since Wonder Boys<\/em> was released, our reactions to some of these subplots might have changed (how Tripp glibly calls Terry\u2019s latest paramour a \u201ctransvestite\u201d; how Hannah is a sort of literary manic pixie dream girl who thinks Tripp and James are both geniuses and provides them with alternating encouragement and tough love; how Terry, Tripp, and James giggle over a backstory they imagine for a Black man they see at a bar). And although McDormand is her usually excellent no-nonsense self, contrasting well with Douglas\u2019s potheaded bemusement, Wonder Boys<\/em> is very much a movie about, well, boys: the promising writer Tripp once was, the promising writer James now is, and Terry\u2019s role in both their careers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The three of them are mostly in orbit around each other, doing a complicated dance of ambition, resentment, and opportunity. Downey\u2019s Terry is the most interesting character onscreen in any scene he\u2019s in, a man looking for his next big discovery, all smooth talk and amused energy. Maguire is a wide-eyed lamb as the incredibly sensitive wunderkind James, who can rattle off movie character suicides, is moved to tears thinking of Marilyn Monroe\u2019s fame and loneliness, and is a phenomenally compelling liar. And Douglas, bedecked in a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, ratty beanie, and overly long scarf that are meant to foreground him as a \u201ckooky English professor\u201d archetype, makes clear that Tripp is a man slowly trying to be honest to himself and to others, but unsure of what it takes to get there. He lingers a little too long reading James\u2019s secret novel, watching Sara in her greenhouse, and sitting in his soon-to-be-ex-wife\u2019s family home, revealing to her father how little he really knew about the daughter that he married. As those scenes stretch out, Douglas holds your attention as an uncertain man going with the flow of odd situations\u2014a practically nonsensical conversation with James\u2019s parents, a t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate with the Black man from the bar\u2014as he wonders whether anything he\u2019s done has mattered. \u201cBooks, they don\u2019t mean anything. Not to anybody. Not anymore,\u201d Tripp says, but of course he\u2019s wrong about that, and Wonder Boys<\/em> is passionate in its defense of storytelling as one of the last remaining methods of truth telling in our world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That insistence that the written word matters, and that it unifies us in ways you wouldn\u2019t anticipate, suffuses Wonder Boys<\/em> with the kind of warm sincerity that defined films like Almost Famous<\/em><\/a> and Pump Up the Volume<\/em><\/a>, too: films that found their characters desperately searching for some kind of purpose in a world that seems uncaring, unfriendly, and uncomfortable. That can seem like an impossible struggle, but Wonder Boys<\/em> posits the creation of art as a kind of escape, and the bond you form with others striving toward the same thing as a sort of rescue. \u201cWe need all the downy innocents we can get,\u201d Tripp tells Hannah, and the environment of heartfelt affection and light mockery in which Wonder Boys<\/em> situates its characters is worth revisiting. “Wonder Boys” is now streaming on Amazon Prime<\/a> and on Hulu<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/wonder-boys2-1024x683.jpg\")
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