In this unusual comedy based on Michael Chabon's novel, Michael Douglas gives a nuanced and sensitive performance as Grady Tripp, a tired, depressed Pittsburgh college professor and novelist who's having a mid-life crisis. Seven years earlier Tripp's novel, The Arsonist's Daughter, had been a triumph that had made him one of the wonder boys of the literary world, but he hasn't published anything since. The new novel he's working on has become a bloated, baroque accumulation of sentences that's spinning wildly out of control with no end in sight. The manuscript weighs in at 2,611 single-spaced pages, and includes such minutia as everyone's dental records and genealogies of the characters' horses.
As the film opens, it's the Friday of the weekend that the college's annual literary symposium called WordFest takes place, and Tripp's third wife has just left him. But Tripp has little time to brood since he must pick up his editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) at the airport. Ostensibly Crabtree is coming to Pittsburgh for WordFest, but actually he's coming to hound Tripp to complete his novel. Crabtree gets off the plane from New York accompanied by someone he's met on the flight--someone who Tripp, even though he's high on marijuana, realizes is a man dressed as a woman. While waiting for luggage, Tripp remarks to his editor, "She's a transvestite," to which Crabtree rejoins, "You're stoned!" But Tripp stubbornly persists, "She's still a transvestite."
Tripp, Crabtree, and the transvestite all head for the WordFest kickoff cocktail party, which is held at the home of Walter (Richard Thomas) and Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand). But Tripp is barely inside the door when a dog begins to growl and looks ready to attack him. Walter's dog knows what his master, who is chairman of Tripp's department at the college, is blissfully unaware of: Walter is being cuckolded by Tripp. At the party, Tripp's troubles deepen when Sara tells him she's carrying his child.
When Tripp goes outside to smoke a joint, he sees James Leer (Tobey Maguire), one his most talented students, standing in the shadows holding a gun. The professor knows James is obsessed with Hollywood suicides, and Tripp fears that the student himself might be suicidal. Hoping to rescue James, Tripp sneaks him into the Gaskell's bedroom where Walter keeps his baseball memorabilia collection. There Tripp shows the student Walter's prize possession--the jacket that Marilyn Monroe wore when she married Joe DiMaggio. James is so moved that he is brought to tears because her jacket "just looks really lonely hanging there in the closet."
After everyone else has left the house, Tripp and James start to leave as well. But on the way out, Walter's dog bites down hard on Tripp's leg and doesn't let go until shot dead by James. Complicating matters further is the fact that James has stolen the Marilyn Monroe jacket.
Stashing the dog's dead body in the trunk of Tripp's 1966 Ford Galaxie, Tripp and James take off on a meandering odyssey in and around Pittsburgh that turns out to be a voyage of unintentional self-discovery. The delight of this journey is in the relationship between the middle-aged man and the young man, both of whom are kindred spirits and lost souls. James is a glib, compulsive liar who makes up the details of his life as he goes along. Professor Tripp bumbles through the unfolding events in a pot-induced haze, and he has a tendency to suffer from fits of vertigo whenever he gets too close to painful truths. Yet, Tripp matures a little because in the troubled, talented student he sees a reflection of himself. As a happy accident of their misadventures, James comes of age a little and gets a big break when Crabtree reads his first novel, The Love Parade, and decides to publish it. When James is placed under arrest for stealing the Marilyn Monroe jacket, he expresses his gratitude to Tripp by saying from the back seat of a police car, "Even if I end up going to jail, you're still the best teacher I ever had."
Although much of the action eventually descends into madcap debacle, all the major characters get what they're really looking for by the end of the WordFest weekend. Tripp manages to be freed of the magnum opus he could never finish; when asked why he continued writing it even though he didn't know what it was about, he answers "I couldn't stop." And even Walter Gaskell finds a publisher for his dubious pet project: "a critical exploration of the union of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe and its function in American mythopoetics," which he has tentatively titled The Last American Marriage.
This was a film I loved when I saw it on the big screen. Seeing it again on my TV screen at home, I got even more enjoyment out of it. A lot of the story takes place in the intimate interiors of houses and the cramped quarters of cars, and Dante Spinotti's cinematography plays quite well on the small screen. The film also has a lot of fast and funny dialogue, and being able to replay some of it repeatedly is definitely a plus. I like the music in the movie, too, especially Bob Dylan's Oscar-nominated song "Things Have Changed."
| 