Book-smart vs. life-smart

Just because you're the brightest guy in the classroom doesn't mean you're not a dimwit outside of it. That's the point of Smart People, a morose comedy that down to the nanometer calibrates the distance between book-smart and life-smart.

Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), a professor of Victorian literature at Carnegie-Mellon, is furry and furious as a bear poked awake during hibernation.

Lawrence has even less personal charm than Jeff Daniels' similarly conceived professor in The Squid and the Whale, and is even more contemptuous of his pupils and supersmart spawn.

Son James (Ashton Holmes) is a student at Carnegie-Mellon, struggling free of Lawrence's orbit. Daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) is an intellectual snob and her father's satellite.

Enter Lawrence's ne'er-do-well brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), who knows more about life than Lawrence knows about Dickens. Chuck is a better teacher than big bro, and helps Lawrence become a marginally more balanced man and Vanessa a slightly less-driven brainiac. Chuck even persuades his brother to date Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), whose neuroses are a perfect fit with Lawrence's.

Quaid's character was more entertaining when Michael Douglas played him in Wonder Boys; Page's was better when she herself played the teen know-it-all in Juno.

The overreaching script by novelist Mark Poirier is intermittently funny. One gets the sense that Poirier was aiming for Scrabulous dialogue but his movie is barely of Boggle quality. In his feature debut, commercials director Noam Murro gets a distinctive performance from Church, but everything else about his film is generic.

Smart People ** (out of four stars)

Directed by Noam Murro. With Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page and Thomas Haden Church. Distributed by Miramax Films.

Running time: 1 hour, 35 mins.

Parent's guide: R (profanity, sexual candor, marijuana, underage drinking)

Playing at: area theaters