Curtis Hanson ‘s adaptation of the Michael Chabon’s novel is just glorious. It’s wise, charming and bittersweet, and Marilyn Monroe ‘s small black coat becomes a metaphor for nostalgia, the souring of the American Dream, and a multitude of missed chances.
Michael Douglas is Grady Tripp, a stoner professor of creative writing at a university, who’s effectively a repository for middle-aged stagnation. He’s failed to get his second book published (I know the feeling) and finds he’s wasting so much energy on smoking weed and drinking, watching his students achieve greatness.
What stops this from indulging in Woody Allen clichés are the many nuances the cast brings to the excellent script. He ends up babysitting Tobey Maguire’s depressive outcast student James Leer, who epitomises everything he resents. A love/hate relationship plays out between the unlikely friends, both at different life stages, but both epitomising frustrated academics.
It’s a snapshot of life, slight while showing glimmers of profundity about failure, ambition and the detours we get stuck on as we age. It’s great in a small, caustic and unassuming way, the kind of film that always seems to get overlooked among the Oscar -bait- which is all to the good.
Hit The North 