Coming-of-
age is not limited to the transition from
adolescence to adulthood. A coming-of-age
emotionally can occur at any time in one's life.
Winner of the AFI award for Movie of the Year in
2001, Wonder Boys features a commanding
performance by Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp, a
once great novelist who is now a burned out,
pot-smoking English Professor at a college in
Pittsburgh. Tripp has been working on a massive
novel that has grown to 2611 pages for the last
seven years, but who has lost the inspiration to
complete it.
Set on the college campus, Professor Tripp is
not having a good day. His wife has just left
him, his lover (Frances McDormand), wife of the
University Chancellor (Richard Thomas), tells
him that she's pregnant, his flamboyant gay
editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey, Jr.) is
coming from New York for the college's annual
writer's festival, and one of his most promising
students, James Leer (Tobey McGuire), a
brilliant but suicidal young writer, has
attached himself to Tripp.
Out of these many and varied crises comes a
comedy of wit and intelligence that includes
such bizarre circumstances as the theft of
Marilyn Monroe's fur coat, the unfortunate
demise of the Chancellor's dog, a stolen
Cadillac, a novel blowing in the wind, and much
more. These strange occurrences bring with them
the opportunity for Tripp to reassess his life
and discover what new directions are open to
him. Wonder Boys is brilliantly written, funny,
and touching and one of my favorite films of the
last decade. It is one of the few films I know
that is comfortable with smoking pot and having
sex, both gay and straight, not as a
manipulative plot device or a display of
weakness, but as a part of normal, every day
life.