影视听力 第39期:Smart People 聪明人（在线收听）

中年男子劳伦斯是一名教授维多利亚时期文学的老师，他心地很善良，但是给人的印象却尖酸刻薄，专横暴躁。妻子去世后，他独自抚养着两个孩子。因为他的臭脾气，儿子跟他变得越加疏远，女儿也整天闷闷不乐。劳伦斯对此痛心疾首，却也无可奈何。直到他爱上了自己以前的学生珍妮特，终于被迫开始改变自己，卸掉所有的伪装，以求得到自己心爱的人。

 对话文本:(系普特网友整理，文本只包括旁白影评部分，不包括电影原声。)

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 and curmudgeon.

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.