Wonder Boys: reality and damn good writing

I watched the movie before I read the book, and it was how I got to love all of Michael Chabon’s writing. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is my favorite Chabon book (or possibly my favorite book, period), I keep going back to Wonder Boys.

In my opinion, the book is much darker the the movie, and makes fairly different points on several occasions that won’t be found in the movie. Mind, I’m not in the least trying to pit the book against the movie. I feel that each version of the story works in its own medium, and holds very different charms for its audience.

On this occasion, I’m recalling the movie, and the many charms that it held for me (and my then struggling writer-persona). My friend Carl was the first one who told me about the movie in 2002, since it was a relatively inconspicuous presence when it came out in the box office in 2000. Sad.

The story is based on Chabon’s own experience with struggling with writing. After publishing his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburg, he found himself working for five years on an huge second novel, Fountain City. But 1,500 pages later, he realized the story was rambling on, so he stopped working on it. Now anyone who has seen the movie or read the book will immediately recognize the same storyline in central character Grady Tripp’s life.

A novelist with a unfinished manuscript at 2,611 pages and going, Tripp (Michael Douglas) also wrote a successful novel seven years earlier which won a PEN award. But since that time, things seem to have gone downhill, as we see him as a rather sad, disheveled figure, teaching writing at a Pittsburg college, having an affair with the chancellor of the college, and in suddenly stuck on a weekend of misadventure after his student, James Leer (Tobey Maguire), accidentally kills the chancellor’s dog and his eccentric publisher, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey, Jr.) comes to town to try to squeeze his manuscript out of him.

The writing is magnificent for the screenplay, and scenes from the book are translated visually in the most concise yet powerful and effective way, sometimes taking on comic undertones (example: how it is revealed that Tripp’s book is 2,611 pages long). What is espcially charming is the dialogue, which has a certain offbeat rhythm to it, and surprises you with recalled words and ironic comebacks when you least expect it.

Reviews often note Douglas’ performance, especially because of how different from his roles before it. Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir says in his article:

“It had to happen eventually. Michael Douglas, Mr. Crisis of ’90s Masculinity himself, the movie star who seems, paradoxically enough, to be widely loathed, has made a film in which he looks like total crap. I mean, on purpose. (My significant other claims that the real human-rights violation in Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct” was not its representation of lesbianism but its all-too-flagrant display of Douglas’ bare ass.) Shambling through the wintry Pittsburgh of “Wonder Boys” as decaying novelist Grady Tripp, unshaven, unkempt and frequently clad in a fuzzy pink woman’s bathrobe, Douglas actually resembles a middle-aged human being for the first time.

This is such a shock because most of Douglas’ previous characters are guys whose entire raison d’être seems to be avoiding the aging process. Grady, on the other hand, is long past meltdown; he hasn’t just gone to seed, he looks like he’s got mushrooms growing in his ears. He’s still a soul in anguish — maybe Douglas can’t help bringing that to his character — but it’s a pretty genial, vague, marijuana-steeped anguish. Grady is the genuinely likable if profoundly flawed hero of this literate upscale entertainment…”

Bottomline, it is a thoroughly unelegant story about losing steam as a writer and the possibly ridiculous and destructive consequences that result, and about finding redemption and hope and all things hard-earned at the end of a very long, very tiresome and yet still continuous road.

Bob Dylan had a song in the movie’s soundtrack. I love the music video, which is thankfully up on YouTube. It puts Bob Dylan into the movie, hypothetically, and comes off as very entertaining (at least for a Bob Dylan fan) even funny.

Images taken from this desktop wallpaper site.