I heard WONDER BOYS described as a movie for grownups, and find the description to be comfortingly true. The story concerns an English professor named Grady Tripp who wrote a book once, but can't seem t o do it again, so he justifies his existence as an English professor by being "colorful." You know the type--those that think "professor" is synonymous with eccentric, outlandish, and erratic.

We first meet Tripp in the classroom, dealing with yet another University staple--the talented and morose young student with a gift for fiction that negates all perception of reality. Out of the classroom we discover that it's a tough day for Tripp. It's the annual writers' festival, an obviously painful time for him, but particularly so now, since his editor has arrived to pick up the new manuscript, which is growing like Topsy, but likely to never be finished.

Tripps life is further complicated when he attends a party at the home of the University Chancellor and her husband, the head of the English department. As Tripp arrives at the party, the Chancellor whisks him off to a private corner to tell him that she's pregnant with Tripp's child. As Tripp deals with this new event in his life, Leer turns up and the pair become involved in a sequence of events that is at once far-fetched and yet oddly plausible.

Tobey Maquire plays the young writer with a lack of energy that is remarkable, and Michael Douglas as the English professor has never been better. Robert Downey Jr. is equally fine as the editor with problems of his own. And Frances McDormand's Chancellor is mature and calm in a sea of scatterbrains. There's a playful irony in the casting of Richard Thomas as the somewhat stuffy English department head, as if the idealistic young writer of The Waltons fame had come of age.

I won't five away too much of the plot, but I will assure you that this film gets my wholehearted vote. I loved everything about it. There were moments that urge ucontrollable laughter and others that caused me to nod my head sagely as if an ultimate truth had been unfolded before me.

Wonder Boys is directed by Curtis Hanseon, of L.A. Confidential fame. But I like this film much more. there's humor and honetly, coupled with enough of the bizarre to stop the film from preaching, whil still proving to be a successful coming of age story about a middle age academic.