Wonder Boys (2000)

5 months ago

by Brianna Ashby

“In my experience, I have found that the solutions to all of life’s most intractable problems are not found through any form of intellect or cleverness. They are solved simply by moving on.” – Carl Jung

It’s been raining all day. As I write I can hear it coming down, steady and insistent, and I keep getting lost in the hushed cacophony of a million drops of water hitting my roof in unison, struggling to stay in the present as the rain pushes me further and further back in time. On rainy days like this I used to walk, take the trolley, catch a subway, or ride the T, to whichever coffee shop I called home in whatever city I was trying to make my home at the time. Armed with a black sketchbook whose spine was always cracked, a variety of writing utensils, and barely enough money for coffee, I’d find a table or a chair tucked in a corner where I could disappear. With my boots sloughing the rain off into a pool beneath me, and the sad drips from my bangs smudging the ink in my pseudo-diary, I sat and sipped and sulked. Mostly I sulked.

I was lonely when I was alone and somehow I was even lonelier when I was with someone else, and I did a horrific job of hiding my perpetual discomfort and disappointment, and as I wallowed in all of the ways I was sure I had gone wrong, and all of the ways I was sure I had been wronged, I made sure that whoever I was with felt helpless and shitty too. What else could they possibly do to make me happy? What could they possibly have done to make me so sad? When I think about it now it makes me vaguely nauseous knowing just how self-centered and pathetic I was; that any morning I could have woken up and decided that things were going to change, and like that, they could have changed. Needless to say, I didn’t have any sunrise revelations, but I’ll be damned if things didn’t change anyway, they just changed without me. For all intents and purposes, I was paralyzed. I made choices that felt like steps but I couldn’t see into the future and I couldn’t return to the past so I moved laterally and convinced myself that I was actually doing something. I’d figure it out soon enough though, that everything had stayed exactly the same, that nothing begets nothing, and I’d sit and sulk and drip into a latté in my new favorite coffee shop.

Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is at a standstill, but his life is pure chaos; he’s been left by yet another wife, his affair with the university’s married chancellor is on a road to nowhere, the student renting one of his rooms insists on trying to sleep with him, it’s been seven years since the publication of the novel that made him a literary darling, and the follow-up novel he has been promising his publisher has become his albatross. Rumors percolate among his students that he’s the proverberial one-trick pony, that he’s either washed up or, more generously, that he’s simply been suffering from a rather extreme case of writer’s block…for the past seven years.

He’s self-involved and self-loathing, psychically fragile and emotionally hobbled. His inner coils are wound so tightly that he has fainting “episodes” in times of stress, as if his brain is equipped with an emergency shut off valve that prevents the whole thing from exploding like an overheated nuclear reactor. He’s a champion self-medicator and a master of self-deprecation living in a perpetual state of denial, keeping up appearances to keep everyone at bay. Grady is sleepwalking through the dull and rather unpleasant dream his life has become, spending the majority of his waking hours detached and stoned, going through the motions, waiting for someone or something to shake him back into consciousness. What he soon discovers, however, is that no matter how still you stand the world still turns and things still happen, and when you’ve relinquished your power to something as fickle as the universe, things happen to, and not for, you.

Ironically, the only stable thing in Grady’s life is his affair with Chancellor Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), wife of Walter Gaskell, who happens to be chairman of the English Department and, in turn, Professor Tripp’s boss. She is the exception to every rule. With her he is at ease, open about his difficulties, and unafraid of judgment. Their time together is the only time that he is free from the unfinished novel that haunts every other moment of his life. With everything else falling away around him, she is the only thing he wants to hold onto, and the only thing he can see with clarity, but circumstances as they are, what he wants and what he can have are disparate things, in his mind anyway. He’s resigned himself to the idea of their being star crossed lovers, just as he’s resigned himself to being a literary one-hit wonder, just as he’s resigned himself to his position as a lonely middle-aged professor destined to keep doing all of the boring and obvious things that lonely middle-aged professors do in the midst of a mid-life existential crisis. Their love for each other is mutual, but only Sara has the gift of wishful clairvoyance that allows her to see past their circumstances to the promising future they could have together. She is willing to turn her life upside down to make their relationship work, prepared to leave her husband and start all over again with this poor wretch of a man that she loves, but at the same time, she is too intelligent to believe that a person can ever force another person to change, even for love. She’s hopeful, but Sara Gaskell isn’t holding her breath.

Then something happens.

Sara Gaskell is pregnant.

WordFest, a literary event for aspiring authors, is kicking off at the university with a soirée at the Gaskell’s home. Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), Grady’s editor, has flown in under the guise of attending the festivities in order to scout fresh talent, but in reality, he’s come to squeeze blood from Tripp’s stone. The whole business only serves to pour salt in the psychic wounds of the hopelessly blocked Professor. It’s in this setting and this mind space that Sara informs Grady that she’s with child. His child. The news sends him reeling, and naturally, he immediately distances himself from the situation, physically and emotionally, leaving the party to find a nice quiet place to smoke some dope and escape. His solitary freak out is interrupted by the spectral figure of James Leer (Tobey MacGuire) -insomniac, exceptionally gifted writer, social pariah, and one-man movie suicide database - materializing in the darkness. Had it had been any other night, Grady would have encouraged James to dissolve back into the shadows from which he came, but on this night, loneliness and vulnerability goad the professor into taking the macabre young man under his wing.

A series of darkly humorous misfortunes drive the two closer as Tripp comes to see James as a comrade in isolation, largely self-imposed. Even after discovering that the young man is a pathological liar and the professor’s sympathies have been misplaced, Tripp doesn’t send him away. He needs him. Grady sees in James the infinite number of paths he himself could have taken if only he had had the balls. While Grady edges closer to losing Sara because of his emotional paralysis, he watches as James starts asserting himself and making choices and embracing his flaws; doing all of the things his “aging prizefighter” of a mentor cannot. James is proof that there is a future, at least for someone, and proof that all of his efforts haven’t been for naught. Even if everything else is blown to smithereens and all is lost, at least James Leer believes in him, at least Grady Tripp would have something to hold on to.

Then something happens.

All is lost.

After another darkly humorous misfortune, this time involving Crabtree and the only copy of Tripp’s eternally unfinished novel, Grady finally knows what he has to do and he does it. Unburdened at last, he tosses out everything else that was holding him back, paving the way toward the life he wants to lead, paving the way to Sara. She is his choice, she always has been. He just had to catch a glimpse of himself without her to know it. For years he had gone through the motions, marrying women he never bothered to get to know, writing and writing and writing because he was too afraid to stop, staying too stoned to feel anything, and finally he found something that was worth the pain of breaking all of his bad habits. He may have lost everything (his wife, his car, his novel, his job) but he gained EVERYTHING, and sometimes that’s what it takes.

Figuring out who you are and what you want is never a short or painless process. It took me a long time to figure out where I wanted to go and to let go of the things that were stopping me from getting there. I had to get out of my own head. I had to stop going to coffee shops. I had to stop taking people for granted and sabotaging my relationships. I had to start making choices. I had to trust myself. Little by little I chipped away at my stumbling blocks until I could see far enough into the future to know where I was headed, and was open enough to find someone that would help me get there. I still like to sit in coffee shops on rainy days, armed with my laptop, headphones, and enough money for a latté AND a pastry, thinking about the girl I was and the woman I am, saying, man, if only she could see me now. I have everything.

Brianna Ashby knows that Katie Holmes was also in this movie, but her character was so annoying that she couldn’t be bothered to try to squeeze her in. She tumbls here (Holmes-free).