影视英语听力 第39期：Smart People 聪明人
对话文本:
Smart People is a new comedy directed by Noam Murro, from the script by Mark Poirier. Its impressive cast includes Thomas Haden Church, Sarah Jessica Parker and Juno's Ellen Page, but it's all really anchored by Dennis Quaid who plays a middle-aged English professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
He's a widower with two grown children and he is a first-class contrarian andcurmudgeon.
The character's name is Lawrence Wetherhold. He teaches Victorian literature. He's shopping around an unpublishable manuscript, attacking every other school of critical thought in the universe, and he's just basically a grouchy contrarian guy.
He has two grown children, one of them, who lives with him, his daughter, a high school senior, played by Ellen Page.
One day, his adopted brother, Chuck, that's Thomas Haden Church, shows up to sleep on his couch, try to borrow money, and just generally be a nuisance.
Also complicating Lawrence's life are the romance that he strikes up with a former student who is now an emergency room doctor. She's played by Sarah Jessica Parker.
Now the real charm of this movie is that the plot--it doesn't really matter as much as the characters. It's a wonderful collection of highly idiosyncratic, mildly ridiculous but very real and ultimately very touching and sympathetic people. And part of the point of Smart People is that, no matter how smart you are or think you are, you can still have trouble navigating the most basic decisions and choices in your life. And no matter how far along in life you get, you still face these basic questions--how are you gonna act, who are you gonna be, how are you gonna relate to the people around you, what is happiness gonna consist of for you. And what makes this movie, I think, unusually rich and subtle is that it faces these questions without predetermined answers, without a lot of sentimentality, and with a real feel for how people act, and talk and behave around each other.
