Revisiting Hours: The Passion of Michael Douglas Wonder Boys

Every Friday, were recommending an older movie available to stream or download and worth seeing again through the lens of our current moment. Were calling the series Revisiting Hours consider this Rolling Stones unofficial film club. For this weeks Thanksgiving-weekend edition: David Fear on Curtis Hansons lit-com Wonder Boys.

A man should live out his life fully and completely give form too every feeling, reality to every dream.-George Saunders in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

Things have changed.-Bob Dylan, Oscar Winner

Let us now praise Michael Douglas, patron saint of bad screen-male behavior. Seriously, browse through some of the better-to-bestknown titles in the 74-year-old actors back catalog, from the Reagan to the Clinton era, and it reads like a roll call of modern XY-chromosome toxicity. A sampling: the entitled philanderer-turned-victim of Fatal Attraction (1987); an icon of unregulated, unchecked capitalism in Wall Street (1987); the satirical man-of-the-house spouse in the still brilliant War of the Roses (1989); a swingin-dick detective in Basic Instinct (1992); the personification of white-man rage in Falling Down (1993); the target of reverse sexual harassment in the Michael Crichton misogynistic cheese-whiz Disclosure (1994); a self-involved investment banker in need of a kick to the head in The Game (1997); and a wife-murdering hedge-fund manager straight out of a Dateline special in A Perfect Murder (1998).

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There were other roles in between, screwball adventurers and American presidents. But for a decade-plus, Douglas was a great go-to guy for a certain strain of middle or upper-class alphas sometimes put-upon, sometimes grab-em-by-pussy swaggering, always representative of a Master of the Universe mentality and always with great hair. The damage done by a generation who didnt get the irony behind Greed is good is all around us; you can picture an incel clubhouse with a poster of late 80s Douglas on its walls. You wanted a cucks-socker back then? Who ya gonna call?

It was a fertile niche, even if it wasnt who this Hollywood-royalty-turned-TV-sidekick, Oscar-winning-producer-turned-movie-star felt that he really was. By the end of the 20th century, Douglas was ready for a change. You could not picture him playing Grady Tripp, the burnt-out husk of a literary stereotype that powers Wonder Boys, when Michael Chabons novel first lined bookstore shelves in 1995. Based loosely on Chuck Kinder, a novelist and creative-writing professor who taught Chabon at the University of Pittsburgh back in the Eighties, Tripp is a gent stuck in a rut. Hes described as a dented, gas-guzzling, old Galaxie 500 of a man. Once, his book The Arsonists Daughter (that title!) gave him a taste of next-big-thing celebrity, a PEN award and the possibility of tenure. Now, hes neck-deep in a massive monolith of a follow-up, a manuscript with no end in sight. A over-fondness for marijuana is not helping him locate his M.I.A. muse, either. Nor is an affair hes having with his department heads wife.

The cheating with another guys spouse that felt like familiar Douglas antihero territory. Everything else? It was just too former-great-man-in-free-fall for him. (Even Falling Downs D-Fens gets a vigilante-like reclamation arc.) Which is partially why, by 2000, Douglas wanted the role so badly. I was in the market for a romantic comedy role, he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Something a little offbeat. What he needed was a change, and Tripp and the movie version of this book would deliver it. Not a radical one like, say, playing Liberace in a biopic,. That would come later. But enough that, thanks to director Curtis Hanson and screenwriter Steve Kloves, the stars usual male protagonist would get his own miniature passion play. Forget the rom-com. How about a lit-com?

Wonder Boys starts with clanging bells they toll for thee, fellas and a voiceover that couldnt be more of a parody of a certain type of prose: The young girl sat perfectly still in the confessional, listening to her fathers boots scrape like chalk on the ancient steps of the church, then grow faint then disappear altogether. They are not Tripps words, though hes reading them aloud. They belong to James Leer (Tobey Maguire), his student and the wunderkind whos a stand-in for every youngster nipping at a fortysomething writers heels. Along with Q, Rip Torns Mailer-esque eminence grise whos at the university for its annual WordFest celebration, these three scribes represent a sort of Ascension of Man chart of the Great American Male Novelist, with Douglass Grady right in the not-quite-knuckle-dragging middle.

The real corner of the Three-Stooges triangle, however, is Tripps editor: Terry Crabtree, an all-purpose hedonist who breezes into town with a 65 drag queen on his arm and an insistent curiosity where his prize authors long-awaited second book is. (Knowing that Downey, who was in a California prison thanks to drug-related charges when the film was released in February 2000, would eventually pull out of his tailspin makes these scenes easier to watch now; as it is, they remind you how talented he was even at his most volatile.) This trio of Tripp, Leer and Crabtree the Father, the Son and the Holy-Shit Ghost are the wonder boys in the middle of the movies misadventures, involving a stolen piece of memorabilia (Marilyn Monroes wedding jacket), a gun, a dead dog, a car whos true ownership is in question and pages upon pages upon pages drifting into the Mononghela River.

And while the films ambling, semi-stoned pace and tone isnt quite a screwball comic speed (NY Times A.O. Scott said it was like a George Cukor movie with a bad head cold, which, yknow, ouch), its incredible how well the film itself holds up, not just quality-wise but in a then-to-now-ratio manner. Yes, the tall female impersonator character still feels like it could tip into butt-of-a-joke insensitivity at a moments notice. But this is a movie in which the requisite sexy underage dream girl take a bow, Katie Holmes doesnt end up sleeping with the older man and doesnt just serve the function of being a middle-age-crazy metaphor. Her Hannah Green is not a symbol of his fading youth; shes the one, in fact, who tells him to lay off the dope. This is a movie in which Douglas has an age-appropriate, if adulterous relationship with Frances McDormand, who lends the role a sexiness without turning her academic into a symbolic savior figure. It goes without saying that they do not make movies like this anymore in the Marvel-uber-alles age, but Wonder Boys should be required viewing for shipping superheroes-cinema fanboys, as this is the movie in which Iron Man sleeps with Spider-Man.

Most importantly, this is the movie in which Michael Douglas can be found moping around in a ratty pink bath robe, the sort of outfit that Gordon Gekko and Nick Curran would never be caught dead in. The films other holy trinity Michael Chabon, Curtis Hanson and Steve Kloves do not come to bury the archetype of the Roth/Updike/Bellow author, but they sure as hell did not come to praise him. Seven months after Wonder Boys first hit theaters, Chabons The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay (again with the superheroes!) would mark him as part of a Next Big Thing literary movement a lot different than previous generations of bad-boy novelists. Hanson was coming off of L.A. Confidential and Kloves had two critically lauded writer-director gigs, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone, under his belt. None of them wanted to repeat themselves or be pigeonholed. All of them were intrigued by the idea that the default mode of a former Wonder Boy didnt have to be a Horrible Man. Who better than the poster boy for alpha dude-bros to play someone learning about better living through beta modes?

Douglas would go on to do self-critique movies on his old BDE persona the underrated Solitary Man (2009) is the best, with King of California (2007) a close second. But surprisingly, Wonder Boys is the one that, arguably, holds up best in the post-Reckoning moment. To say that Douglas made movies that demand revisiting now in terms of their retrograde politics and pop culture toxicity would be an understatement; he himself told Marc Maron on his podcast that he was surprised the #MeToo movement had not singled out Disclosure for the backwards mess that it is. To see this gentle repudiation of the fucking-fighting-hard-partying man of letters as a corrective of sorts now feels like an intriguing pivot. These types of boys never had to grow up or get their aint-I-a-stinker? shit together before. But like the Oscar winner singing the title song says, Things have changed.

Previously: The People Under the Stairs