#daniel carlson

Hanson has a few advantages, though, thanks to Chabon’s story and a smart script from Steve Kloves (writer-director of The Fabulous Baker Boys). The movie isn’t about Grady’s work on his novel as much as it is about his shambles of a life, and how his stalled-out art is a reflection of his personal inability to make choices. One brief scene of Grady working on his book, narrated so we can hear his style, is done primarily to stress the length of Grady’s manuscript. (Typing the page number in the corner, he taps three numeric keys, then checks his work and adds a fourth, sighing.)

But the other advantage is that Hanson gets to visually represent the cerebral. The movie is about creative people inspiring each other—Grady, feeling lost and alone, draws on the energy of his gifted student, James Leer (Maguire)—and we get to see that firsthand throughout the film as Grady and other writer characters ponder the inner lives of strangers around them. There’s an outstanding scene early on where Grady is meeting up with his agent, Terry (Downey), and James at a bar, and Grady and Terry get to riffing on the personal history of a man they spy at another booth. The whole clip is worth watching, but the section in question kicks in around the 2:30 mark below:

All that Grady, Terry, and James have to do is see this man in the bar to start imagining whole fictive universes for him: a name, an occupation, a troubled past. This, the movie says, is the creative process, which means that this is what it is to write: you find yourself lit by an energy you cannot name, making reality out of imagination.  

Crucially, too, Hanson doesn’t fawn over Grady or any of the other characters who improvise made-up lives for people. There’s no groveling sense of watching a genius at work; no one ever says to Grady, “You’ve cracked it wide open.” Rather, there’s a sense of joyful chaos, of not quite knowing what idea will come next, that more closely approximates the creative experience. By having the creation be spoken in dialogue, we not only get to hear the ideas come to life, but we get a chance to see how these characters drive, inspire, and relate to each other. When Grady and Terry find themselves at a loss for ideas, only to have James come through with a poetic backstory for the stranger they’ve dubbed “Vernon Hardapple,” it’s not just a representation of the creative process, but a narrative moment that shows James’s skill in comparison with his teacher’s. And it all happens in about sixty seconds.

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If it’s true that creation and destruction are related, though, then any depiction of artistry would have to also honestly reckon with that sense of loss that comes with having missed out on something big. Wonder Boys has that, too. There’s a counterpoint to the bar scene later in the film, after Grady’s suffered a literary and personal tragedy that robs him of the only copy of his manuscript. Asked what the book was about, Grady’s unable to answer anything besides “I don’t know”; when asked why he was writing something he can’t even describe or explain, he simply says, “I couldn’t stop.”

This is where the film digs even deeper into its exploration and understanding of the writing life, and of the creative process in general. It understands the obsession that borders on madness that can drive people to create, and can keep them trapped in a place of chaos out of service to an ideal they think they have to serve. The best thing for Grady would be for this behemoth of a book to be taken away from him, but he can’t see that because he’s too deep into it. He’s enslaved to the idea of the thing instead of the thing itself, so he keeps writing in hopes of finding a way out, not realizing he’s just burying himself in more pages.

His loss of the manuscript is a true blow, and a genuinely jarring and somber moment in a film that until then has mostly flirted with droll dramedy, but this moment of destruction becomes Grady’s moment of creation and renewal. He’s able to let go, to move on, and most importantly, to begin making the choices and commitments in his life that he was refusing to make. His relationships heal, his creativity returns, and life resumes humming merrily along.