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Created Apr 13, 2008 03:00PM PST • Edited Jun 10, 2013 11:54PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Very funny ensemble piece about a man and his family struggling to move beyond the long-ago death of his wife, Smart People deftly skewers the low EQ of some high IQ people.¹

   Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker are perfectly serviceable in not very likable roles. Good thing Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page provide more than enough humor and charisma to carry the movie.
   __________

   ¹ Emotional intelligence trumps traditional smarts most days of the week, and every weekend.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page employ their deadpan delivery styles to great effect, generating a fascinating and touching chemistry with each other in the process. He’s entirely believable as a nincompoop stoner with a good heart and savvy emotional instincts, just as she embodies a hyper-competent Type-A personality.

   She and her father continue to suffer the effects of not coming to terms with the long-ago loss of her mother. Dennis Quaid ably portrays how a widower in this situation carries his grief like a prized possession, stumbling through life in a self-indulgent fog. Combined with his natural haughtiness, this makes him a poor role model, teacher, colleague and boyfriend.

   Sarah Jessica Parker is fine in her role, the smallest of the four major players.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Kind of like a Little Miss Sunshine for the university set, the movie is knowing and serious much of the time, with more than a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, some as visual gags, most as comic dialogue.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

    First time movie director Noam Murro transitions quite successfully to the big screen from Got Milk commercials.

12. Play Really Great 4.5

    Novelist Mark Poirier’s debut screenplay is chock full of pithy lines, like when the sometime girlfriend is welcomed to the dysfunctional Christmas dinner as “anti-venom for the snake-pit.”

13. Music Good 3.0

    Rich acoustic guitar figurings that often sound like they are going to lead into a Crosby, Still & Nash song, but never do.

14. Visuals Great 4.0

    Note overachieving Vanessa’s blue room: blue bed, blue dresser, a bulletin board festooned with blue ribbons. Is this normal, or the lair of a Stanford Stepford Girl?

15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.5

    Teen Vanessa’s (Ellen Page) middle-aged Uncle (Thomas Haden Church) gently turns aside her drunken pass, showing that though he’s a partier, he ain’t no pervert.

17. Sex Titillating 1.7

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Salty 1.8

21. Reality

    Natural 1.0

    The movie felt emotionally authentic, from the existential frustrations of a brilliant man failing to live up to his expectations, to the PTSD of a family that’s lost its maternal center, to a teen girl’s confused impulses.

22. Circumstantial Natural 1.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0