Boys’ room. Left, Michael Douglas,
Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr
on the Wonder Boys set.

FALLING UP

There was a famous moment at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 when director Steven Soderbergh stepped up to receive the Palme d’Or for sex, lies & videotape. It was, he noted wryly, his first film “and I guess it’s all downhill from here!”

Michael Douglas knows just how he felt: he was only 30 when he picked up his first Oscar, as producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in 1975. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is it - this is the highlight of my life,’” he recalls. “‘It can’t get any better than this.’”

Grady in the pink dessing gown (Douglas, with Frances McDormand as Sara in the background).

It did, of course, as Douglas is the first to admit. After another notable foray into producing with The China Syndrome, he resumed his acting career in the late seventies. And, by 1985, he’d bagged a second Oscar, this time as Best Actor for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

The character Douglas plays in Wonder Boys should be so lucky. Seven years ago, Grady Tripp wrote a prize-winning novel and was lionised by the literary world. Now, pushing 50 (though from which side is not clear) and teaching a Creative Writing class at a University in a drab Rust Belt industrial city (the production used Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University as a location), Grady’s life is in chaos. Not so much because of as in spite of this - Grady, after all, seems to thrive on chaos - his second novel shows no sign of getting finished.

It’s not that he has writer’s block. In fact, he could scarcely be less blocked: the real problem is, Grady just can’t stop. Already filling several boxes in his cluttered study, the new novel has reached page 2661 as its author thrashes around in search of an ending.

Which is when James Leer backs into his life. James - played by Tobey Maguire, seen most recently in the lead role of The Cider House Rules - is the best writer in Grady’s class, regularly churning out gloomy short stories with a numbing line in Catholic guilt. Too odd to be popular with his fellow students, James cultivates an air of mystery. But he reluctantly reveals details of his life - most of which turn out to be fabrications - to Grady when they meet in the snow outside a faculty reception. Like Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, James lies a lot “because it helps [him] control the world”.

For Grady, however, controlling James is a whole different ballgame. Before long, the precarious balance with which he has juggled his life - the wife who left him that morning; his ongoing affair with the University Chancellor, Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), who also happens to be married to his head of department, Walter (Richard Thomas); the joints he smokes continuously (and the falling-down fits they seem to bring on); the prying of his editor (played with malicious glee by Robert Downey Jr) who is in town for the college’s annual ‘Wordfest’ and needs to get hold of Grady’s new novel before his own career goes down the tubes - results in all these balls kept somehow in the air starting to come tumbling down.