Dennis Quaid is an actor who's often underestimated, despite consistently solid performances in films such as Flesh & Bone, Mike Nichols' Postcards From The Edge and the underrated Wyatt Earp, for which Quaid starved himself into near anorexia for his brilliant turn as the consumptive Doc Holliday.

Quaid again changes gears in his latest film, starring as prickly English Professor Lawrence Wetherhold, a curmudgeonly widower and academic who's also a frustrated novelist. His smart-arse Republican daughter Vanessa (Juno's Ellen Page) acts as surrogate wife and verbal sparring partner, while son James (A History Of Violence's Ashton Holmes) barely speaks to him. When Lawrence meets Dr. Jane Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker) after a minor head injury, he summons the courage to ask her out on a date, his first in years. At the same time, Lawrence's screw-up brother Chuck (Sideways' Thomas Haden Church) appears on his doorstep looking for a loan and a place to stay, forcing dormant issues to the surface and pushing Lawrence to grow a little.

Despite the cast stridently giving their all, Smart People is undermined by a tepid plot and the deeply uninteresting casting of Sarah Jessica Parker. There's also the tricky problem of a sub-plot concerning the relationship between freewheeling Chuck and his uptight "android" niece Vanessa being infinitely more charming and funny than the film's central story. There's a sub-Wonder Boys whiff to the proceedings as Smart People reaches for qualities closer to that of a Noah Baumbach film (The Squid And The Whale), with its witty repartee and darkly comic dialogue, but it's too muddled and lukewarm to be cutting or incisive, and ultimately lacks the requisite bite to make it truly memorable.