Week #18 2020: Wonder Boys
"Now, that is a big trunk. It holds a tuba, a suitcase, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly."
The second in my series of pieces about what ‘comfort viewing’ means to me (previously featured: Big Night).
We meet Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), tenured creative writing professor, invariably stoned, at the point where life is handing him the bill and telling him the restaurant will be closing soon. A lifetime of decisions deferred, hard choices dodged, have caught up with him. His literary editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr) has come to town, hoping to collect on the long-awaited follow up to the novel that made both of their careers. Meanwhile Grady’s wife (never seen) is leaving him (reasons unexplored but self-evident). His lover (Frances McDormand) tells him that she is expecting a baby, a problem magnified by her marriage to his head of department. Unfortunately, he’s also managed to kill his boss’s beloved dog, aided and abetted by the gloomy star pupil of his writer’s programme James Leer (Tobey Maguire). Faced with this full dance card of responsibility to face up to, he sparks up another joint and settles down to start bashing away at the Remington, tapping out page number 2611 on his magnum opus, kept in four gravestone slabs of single-typed copy.
Director Curtis Hanson took his goodwill from unexpected hit LA Confidential and put his chips all in on this character-driven, low-concept tale of malaise and malingering. The Michael Chabon novel from which it was adapted sprung from Chabon’s real life issues: less writer’s block than writer’s diarrhoea. Trying to create a follow up to his widely praised thesis-project-turned-bestseller The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, he ventured 1,500 pages into a folie de grandeur called Fountain City. Coming to his senses and discarding this millstone, he chopped up this problem as bait for a better idea, a writer’s holiday that became Wonder Boys. Book and novel are irresistible to anyone who has either studied on an English degree, taken part in a creative writing workshop or worked in book publishing (that’s a triple check for me). Despite propagating an idea of the short story that hasn’t existed since John Cheever and Ernest Hemingway stalked the Earth, it has an insider’s view of that world, but also sits wryly above it.
That said, Wonder Boys hits against a challenge that its source novel did not have to contend with: this is a story about someone failing to make decisions, bobbing along on life’s waves through a fug of Humboldt County’s finest. In a novel, even in a catatonic state of inaction, we at least have character’s inner life to draw us in. This isn’t even a story of someone seeking without fully understanding the web they’re carelessly tripping into (think The Big Lebowski or The Parallax View). Nor is it the comic staple of being pinballed, semi-nightmarishly, from one incident to another, hoping to get back onto the clear path from a series of loopy diversions (Bringing Up Baby, Sullivan’s Travels). Grady has no life plan to return to, and he simply refuses to make a decision. The only thing that makes sense in his life is adding more sentences. Katie Holmes’ Hannah, Grady’s acolyte, sneaks a look at her idol’s masterpiece. With trepidation, she reverses their teacher-pupil dynamic, giving him some constructive criticism:
It's just that, you know, I was thinking about how, in class, you're always telling us that writers make choices... And, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the book isn't really great. I mean, really great, but at times it's, well, very detailed, you know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses and all the dental records and so on… and I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but it sort of reads, in places, like, well, actually, like ... you didn't make any choices at all.
There’s a deeper metaphor in this about writer’s lives: busy inventing imagined pathways, they risk absenting themselves from the choices in the ones they are living. Without the compensation of the completed work itself, a writer’s life becomes like the nether dreamworld of Inception: ceaselessly creating like a god, one can live a thousand lives, except your own. Completing his novel to Grady feels like a death: facing up to the limits of his talents, his ageing, his mistakes, his withered promise. But actually, completion offers the chance at a life. Sweetly (and comfortingly), for a film about someone failing to find a satisfactory conclusion to their work, Wonder Boys ends with the neatest of endings.
But in the meantime, how do you make a film about someone not making decisions? The film begins with a piece of triple narration that illustrates the problem. We hear Grady’s voice narrating a story we believe we are watching. Then the camera comes into focus and Grady’s inner narration overlays what turns out to be a short story he is reading; the events we see on screen are merely his view from a window as he reads. Wrapped up in thought upon thought, stories about writers are notoriously hard to inject with drama; by definition, their greatest triumphs are consigned to ‘the life of the mind’, not the propulsion of direct action. It’s instructive to return to Zadie Smith’s dividing line between European films and Hollywood cinema: European films let you feel time passing. Films like The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice – detective stories perverted into a string of happenstance by the influence of THC – contain moments where the aimlessness opens up. Wonder Boys, even though it is similarly about someone who seems to be pacing into every room asking, ‘What did I come in here for?’, retains the propulsion of someone who honed their craft making The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and a string of other thrillers. Each scene has clarity about what characters want (even if they are simply demanding things Grady refuses to deliver), they all have a piece of pleasing business and the increasing build up of narrative coincidences and pressures assures us that the impacted dam will soon overwhelm Grady.
Wonder Boys also has the benefit of its cast to fall back on. Like Paul Newman in The Verdict and Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal, Douglas plays with his established persona as a lovable rogue, riding the line towards genuine arsehole. A risk open to actors with his level of cachet (and a healthy understanding of their own changing looks), it’s a thin line between wanting to fuck you and just saying ‘fuck you’. Douglas brings with him a lifetime of ‘getting away with it’ on screen, and there’s something about seeing Gordon Gecko without a final quip or a route out that’s very appealing. Likewise from the vantage of the year 2000 – before being rehabilitated by Iron Man’s suit – Robert Downey Jr would have seemed a canny choice as someone who has prematurely squandered talent and goodwill (he ended the shoot by violating his parole). Using Downey Jr’s balance of charm and smarm, Terry Crabtree is a rare depiction of sexually promiscuous gay man who isn’t punished or made punchline.
Wonder Boys is a story of people repeating mistakes, with the end of Grady’s third marriage (and the call of fatherhood) asking him whether he wants to step off the merry-go-round of overextended post-graduate life. There’s a hint of Matthew McConaughey’s ‘That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age’ in Professor Tripp’s extended adolescence. Katie Holmes’s Hannah throws herself at him, and it’s a good reminder of some of the reasons people stay in education: it’s hard not to be seduced by the adoration of people in the first phase of adulthood, rather than grasping the nettle of adulthood as it truly is, responsibilities and all. Where Grady Tripp is trapped inside the image of a writer long after the chrysalis has cracked, Tobey Maguire’s James Leer hopes to fly by pretence alone, a caterpillar with wings. Following Grady around while spinning a life story worthy of Flannery O’Connor, he’s is in the depth of melancholy experienced only by young men who have felt no real pain. Despite James’s naivety, as is often the case in stories like this, youth is the answer to age’s problems (luckily it is not through romantic fulfillment here).
Of course, one of the horrors of returning to an older work you formerly found comforting is realising the unsavoury elements, the thumbtacks hidden away in the rhubarb crumble. I’d forgotten the subplot with Robert Downey Jr arriving in town with a trans woman in tow, humanised eventually but the butt of many jokes before. And it’s unsettling to see Grady run his hand around Katie Holmes, doubly in position of power as her teacher and landlord. Perhaps not to my credit, like a relation who you still love despite the occasional racist Facebook post, I still find myself charmed by Wonder Boys. Like the ragged, vomit-pink dressing gown Grady wears throughout the film, it’s worn in, has a bit of personal history woven into it, perhaps isn’t something we put on in front of guests but keeps you warm while the world doesn’t feel faceable. ‘It’s the kind of house, you’d like to wake up in on Christmas morning,’ Grady says about his soon to be former wife’s childhood home, and Wonder Boys has the same feeling: an enjoyable hangout with fun, not entirely redeemable people waiting for us.
A favour if you’re enjoying reading these newsletters: please pass these on to friends who might enjoy them. Maybe you’ve seen Wonder Boys and want to recommend it to someone else, or maybe you haven’t seen it and want to have a distanced group viewing? Hit the forward button!
Recommendations
If you’re looking for another rangy literary adaptation that has a strong ensemble cast, look no further than Nicole Holofcener’s The Land of Steady Habits on Netflix.
I recommended Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Mist a few weeks back, and I’d also heartily recommend his longer work Tale of Tales (available to watch on Youtube). It’s got a deflated minotaur, an errant wolf cub and a sad tale of World War I. This one isn’t for children though.
I’ve been struggling to do much reading under lockdown, despite all the gaping hours, but I’m really enjoying Anne Enright’s Actress.
If you’re looking for a way to get things delivered without resorting to truly awful Amazon, then The Hive is inexpensive and supports the high street.
Not an original thought, but having now finished it in three days, I really recommend the BBC’s adaptation of Normal People. Another piece of viewing that’s catnip to an English graduate, it’s one of the few pieces of television that brings a truly cinematic approach to visual storytelling (rather than just being expensive). It overrode my skepticism about why this deceptively simple story needed to be made. Lenny Abrahamson (who directed half of the series) directed the very good What Richard Did (£2.50 to rent), which retrospectively reads like a dry run of the same themes.