Wonderboys

An unfinished novel, a stolen car, a murdered pet, an unstable student, a fed up wife, a pregnant lover - it's safe to say that professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) has a number of issues to deal with this weekend.

Grady is a 50-ish English professor who hasn't had a thing published in years - not since he wrote his award-winning great American novel, and that's some time ago. It's hardly surprising, then, that his college's annual literary festival fills the former wonder boy with more than his usual quota of self-doubt and anxiety.

This festival weekend, however, proves even worse than he could have imagined as he finds himself reeling from one misadventure to another in the company of a new wonder boy, James Leer (Tobey Maguire). He's Grady's most gifted writing student. He's also a fluent liar whose peculiar behaviour launches the professor on a strange odyssey of self-discovery.

Written by Steven Kloves from the novel by Michael Chabon, directed by Curtis Hanson, Wonder Boys will be one of the funniest films you've seen in a very long time. The humour rises above slapstick comedy into the realms of real life, stories so bizarre that nobody could possibly imagine them: they have to be true.

The film is so well-balanced that if you took out any one character the rest would fall down like a pack of cards. Every one of them contributes to the tribulations of all the others, like a rogue chromosome in your genes.

If you're an observer of life, people and their foibles then Wonder Boys will satisfy that voyeuristic urge. If you simply happen to like well-made films, it will take care of you as well. See it, hear it, enjoy it.

Vicki Robertson