The New Classics: Wonder Boys
Tuesday, August 11, 2020 at 11:59PM 
Scene: The Suicide List
Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys understands that writers are often their own most carefully crafted creations. You can often catch the writers in the film pausing to appreciate when they hit upon just the right turn of phrase. Life doesn’t allow for second drafts. So very satisfying to nail it on the first.
By understanding the way writers reveal themselves through the way they live their lives, Wonder Boys solves the age-old problem of making writing cinematic. We never hear a word of Grady Tripp’s prose that gets blown away at the film’s end, but after we spend two hours stumbling through the shambolic mess of his life, it feels superfluous. His life is already one long, run-on sentence crying out for an editor’s red pen...
Or take James Leer (Toby Maguire, perfectly cast), a prodigiously talented writing student of acclaimed novelist Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas, never better) at an unnamed Pittsburgh university. James lives his life like he’s trying to hook a reader with his mysterious and brooding behavior, but, like many a young writer, he’s overselling it. He spends as much time constructing the image of himself as Suffering Artist as he does cranking out fiction, and he will enthusiastically manufacture that suffering when his own life fails to provide adequate material. He is the type who would rather be discovered skulking in the shadows outside a cocktail party in the midst of an aborted suicide attempt than go through the tiresome process of mingling. It is hard to tell where James’s real emotional fragility starts and the melodramatic fabrications end.
Part of what makes Wonder Boys so rewatchable is the pleasure of spending time in the company of characters who don’t merely perform versions of themselves - because don’t we all - but who do so with real panache. Like when Katie Holmes’ fellow student prompts James to name all the Old Hollywood suicides as a party trick. Showing off his photographic memory would be stunt enough, but James makes a meal of it, lending a musicality to the rhythm of his recitation. (“Pills...pills...A LOT of pills.”) Crucially, he does it all in an off-hand manner, with no indication he believes there is anything odd or impressive about it. In a wonderful touch, James showboats by listing all the celebrities alphabetically, allowing him to reply with perfect casual faux-modesty, “I guess that’s just how my brain works” after Robert Downey Jr.'s editor Terry Crabtree points it out.
Leer’s performance finds its target with Crabtree, who immediately sees the potential in this odd young man. James’ display doesn’t prove talent necessarily, but experience has taught Crabtree to spot one of his people. There’s something about that particular combination of social awkwardness, restless intellect, and facility with language. Notice how Terry immediately falls into the role of editor, suggesting a rewrite to James’ performance of himself: When James declines an invitation to go drinking, Terry offers a stronger ending: “No one your age just wants to go home.”
The covert star of Wonder Boys is the legendary editor Dede Allen, the woman behind movies as varied as Bonnie and Clyde and The Breakfast Club. Allen maintains a crackling comedic energy throughout what could have been a languid and cerebral film. Her cutting is particularly sharp in group scenes where she is attuned to how tension can ripple and ricochet off cross purposes. The suicide list is a showcase for James Leer, but the scene is as much about the tug-of-war between Grady and Terry, Grady trying to protect this vulnerable kid and Terry fascinated by his shiny new find. There is a cut I love when James pauses on Everett Sloane to editorialize “He was good” and we get a quick shot of Grady giving a resigned nod. With that cut Allen connects the scene to an additional thematic level as we realize all these examples of youthful glory ending in disappointment are hitting Grady’s square in his own middle-aged failures.
Grady probably believes he’s left behind the kind of verbal peacocking James displays but what he misses through the pot haze is that he hasn’t outgrown his affectations, they have merely settled into an aimless middle-aged routine. The string of women. The bathrobe. The unfinished book ballooning to elephantine proportions. He is still very much one of the “boys” of the film’s title and the look is getting much shabbier and unappealing absent the bloom of youth. Grady has a fair amount of good advice to impart to James over their time together but he’s going to teach as much by example, even if he does so inadvertently.
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Reader Comments (17)
With this, that's two untouched years to go. 2002. 2006. Can you get to the end of the season with no untouched years on the docket?
Take a bow, James!
Goose bumps every single time.
Peggy is ‘take a bow James’ a line from the film?
One of my personal favorites. Michael Douglas at his finest. I wonder if he was in the sixth spot in 2000.
Love this film. It's based on a novel, I know, but it creates a visual mood of late-night and too-early-morning Pittsburgh in such a beautiful way, including with the Dylan and Cohen songs.
Great article on one of favourite films of the past 20 years. I'm so pleased you highlighted Dede Allen's contribution. A rollicking editing job, and deservedly Oscar-nominated. And I agree that Maguire is perfectly cast. He's exactly right in this.
Raul: I would wager that Douglas was in the sixth spot - and he should have come first! Such an adorable performance. And he totally convinces as a literature professor.
I LOVE this film so much! Not just the words and performances but the look of it, the beautiful snowfall of that conversation outside the party gives way to sloppy wet sludge and dreary rain which all feels so apt for the place where the film is set.
While I'm a huge fan of the film and watch it at least annually it apparently isn't for everyone. I saw it in the theatre with my sister and at the end I told her how much I'd liked it and she replied that she'd hated it in equal measure. Those two responses are what I've run across ever since either a great fondness or total indifference.
That 2000 lineup would have been more impressive if Jamie Bell and Michael Douglas were nominated instead of Russell Crowe and Geoffrey Rush. Crowe should have won the year before.
"Wonder Boys" is such a great, smart and sweet movie-a true modern classic
Peggy Sue - Same
Edward L - Thanks!
Joel6 - The look of this film is amazing. Dante Spinotti, man.
Volvagia - Not sure I agree hunnert percent with your police work there, Lou. If you're not counting Sexy Beast as 2000 then you're using American release dates, in which case Y Tu Mama is 2002 and The Descent is 2006. In that case, the only year I haven't covered is 2013 because Blue Ruin was released in the states in 2014.
Michael C: Non-fest internationalist. Sexy Beast's 2000 date was TIFF. Even in Britain, Sexy Beast WAS 2001. Fixed Blue Ruin. So that makes it 2002, 2006 and 2013 from a non-fest internationalist perspective.
Grady Tripp: I've got tenure.
That line reading gets me everytime. One of my favorite films I haven't seen for a long time. Need to remedy that.
@Raul-AGREED!!!!!!
I like the book better than the film, but Douglas is superb in this, and Maguire and Rip Torn fit it well.
Agreed, it's a new classic with a great script and fantastic performances. It's still puzzling to me that Douglas did not get Oscar nod for this and Tobey Maguire received almost no recognition.
Michael -- I didn't really love this film at the time but this post made me wonder if i really missed out. I have actually been curious to rewatch it even before reading this piece. another great one, Michael.
Raul -- absolutely. what a lineup that would have been!
It really is a miraculous little film in the way it maintains a delicate tone and captures a very specific mood and place without ever stepping a foot wrong.
Plus all three men are doing career best work. Downey in particular has an inexhaustible supply of inspired line readings.