Sundance: Ellen Page Returns

There aren’t many actresses who can make the petite Sarah Jessica Parker look big, but tiny Canadian dynamo Ellen Page does in “Smart People,” a dysfuctional family comedy not dissimilar to SJP’s “The Family Stone” that Miramax is planning to release in April, not withstanding that much of it takes place over the Christmas holidays. Page, who electrified Sundance two years ago in “Hard Candy” and will of course receive an Oscar nomination tomorrow for “Juno,” also blows Parker, the female lead in “Smart People,” off the screen. Parker is less than totally convincing as an emergency room doctor who has an off-and-on romance with her former lit professor Dennis Quaid, who is even less convincing as a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon. But the film is still quite watchable for Page as Quaid’s whip-smart, embittered, wisecracking daughter, a high school student who develops an inappropriate crush on Quaid’s ne’er-do-well adopted brother, hilariously played by Thomas Haden Church. Page was off filming, but Parker was at the screening with hubby Matthew Broderick, whose “Diminished Capacity” has it world premiere today. Broderick looked much slimmed down from the last time I saw him. This was my fourth screening of the day. I knew 10 minutes into “Pretty Bird,” the self-indulgent directorial debut of actor Paul Schneider, that it wasn’t going to work for me despite the presence of Paul Giamatti as the inventor of a rocket belt who develops a conflict with an entrepeneur (Billy Crudup, incredibly annoying). I stuck it out for an hour; there were plenty of walkouts, including the L.A. Times’ Kenneth Turan, who was on the shuttle back to the hotel with me.