Krishna
The movie has a purpose somewhere, but it would take a lot of work to find out what it is. It has some talented actors : You have Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr and others too : Toby McGuire and Katie Holmes, for instance. Yet, the story has no sense or purpose.
Michael Douglas plays Grady Tripp, a professor of Creative Writing in one university in US (Pittsburg) and who is very much admired for his last novel published, which is a masterpiece, but who has not written in many years and faces writer’s block whenever he attempts to add / edit the thick manuscript he already has produced. He tries to inspire his students to become good authors. Robert Downy Jr plays Terry Crabtree, his agent who is impatient for Tripp to finish his second book and hand it to him because his own (Crabtree’s) career is on a downward spiral and he needs this book under his belt to get it going again.
Katie Holmes is Hannah Green, who is in love not only with the subject of the class but also the professor, and throws herself at him constantly. Grady, on the other hand, is having an affair with the wife of his boss, who is the Head Of the English Department in the same university.
Toby McGuire is the weirdest of them all, I mean in the movie, where he plays James Leer, a troubled genius, weird, violent (no, I am not kidding, Toby McGuire really tries to play a violent man! Brings to mind his evil transformation in Spider Man 3) but a creative genius, who is mocked by the class but understood only by Grady, the professor, and Hannah.
The story goes all over the place from there, with Grady prowling around the professor’s house with a key given by his wife, trying to show a coat worn by Marilyn Monroe and he takes James with him. James manages to shoot dead the professor’s dog with his gun and also steals the coat since “it should not be hanging there”. What?
Is that not enough of a confusion for you? How about this? The car loaned to Grady for transport is claimed to be stolen by a thug, who harasses him constantly. Terry is gay, brings a transvestite with him but falls for James and drives him away… (What?)
James reciprocates, even though there is no hint that he is gay anywhere before – he is the mild, geeky (violent!) man. What?
Don’t even get me started on their plot to hide the dog, retrace the car when it is stolen with the half finished manuscript in it, or even the fact that James has a manuscript and what happens to it.
Is it a comedy? Does not feel so. Is it a serious drama? Definitely has no such feel. The story just goes from one subplot to another, with no aim or purpose and at the end, you have a jumbled set of impressions, with no clear idea of what it is that you just finished seeing.
The casting, as I said, is all wrong, not just because of my repeated rants of Toby as a violent killer; even Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr look uncomfortable in their roles. Katie Holmes just goes in and out of scenes, accomplishing nothing much.
I would say, a 2/10
— Krishna