 Starring: Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey
Director: Robert Luketic
Year Of Release: 2008
Plot: Ben (Sturgess) is a super-smart MIT university student looking for a way to fund his upcoming education at Harvard Med. He’s invited by his professor, Mickey Rosa (Spacey), to join a blackjack card counting team, hitting Vegas and taking the casinos for whatever they can, even though the gambling palaces don’t like card counters and are out to stop them. However the real problem is that Ben gets wooed by the easy money and excitement of his new life, which threatens his friendships and finally his life when Mickey reveals his true colours.I |
It strikes me that there are a lot of movies that don’t like smart people. There seems to be something that means we like seeing brainiacs getting their comeuppance.
Actually, come to think of it, it’s more that in film everything needs to be balanced.
Most of us aren’t exceptional, we’re just somewhere in the middle, with average intelligence, enough money to eat but not enough for a yacht, decent but unexceptional social skills and middling looks. However in the movies anyone who has anything truly extraordinary about them needs to have something else that’s deficient, so that it all evens out. If you start succeeding on all levels - e.g. you’re brainy, rich, have a beautiful girlfriend and enjoy a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle – the world of film decides you’re obviously an asshole and therefore need a quick slap and to learn that you’re not allowed all these things and had better stop having such a good time.
21 is a perfect example of this, where Ben starts out doing alright as a genius nerd, but as soon as he gets money, a beautiful girlfriend and a great social life, he’s immediately shown to have gotten too big for his boots and has to be taught a lesson, which is taken to the extreme with Laurence Fishburne smacking the crap out of him for card counting.
It’s not that he’s brainy that’s the problem, but that in the movies if you’re smart you need to be deficient in another way to make up for it. Ben has two equally smart friends, but they’re good smarty-pants, because they’re gracious enough to be stereotypically nerdy, and therefore socially awkward and unable to talk to girls. They have enough minus point to make up for their intelligence and so we’re allowed to like them. The whole film is basically about teaching Ben that lesson – that if he wants to be smart, he’d better learn to have some deficiencies, so that when everything’s added up, he comes out as normal.
21 is by no means the only film that follows this formula. In fact all you need to do is look at some of the most successful, Oscar-winning movies about geniuses to realise that the only good genius is one who’s at least decent enough to have major problems elsewhere. Just look at John Nash (Russell Crowe) in A Beautiful Mind, David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman) in Rain Man or even Will (Matt Damon) in Good Will Hunting, all of whom are the heroes of the movie not because they’re gifted people with amazing talents in maths or music, but because they also have huge mental issues. Everything’s been balanced out and so we don’t mind marvelling at their talents. If these films were just about someone who was brilliant, a perverse sense of jealousy would probably ensure we didn’t want to watch a movie about them.
In fact it’s not even just geniuses that need to be balanced, it’s anyone with anything exceptional, as even the superheroes who’ve found the most favour with audiences are those with terrible angst and tragic backstories, like Batman and Spider-man.
There’s no doubt that in the movies we like our geniuses balanced out, so that overall they don’t make us seem like we’re the ones who are deficient. It’s all because we don’t like to think there are people out there who are smarter, richer, better looking and probably having more sex than us, and so film kindly provides us with the almost perverse pleasure of showing us that anyone exceptional either has some sort of awful problem elsewhere in their lives, or else will be taught a lesson and brought down to earth with a thud. And while those lessons may be couched in terms of teaching them not to be arrogant, it’s really because we want to feel like even though there may be nothing exceptional about us, in the grand scheme of things, everything balances out.
And if you’re still not convinced that generally films don’t like smart people, just ask yourself why there are so many super-smart villains in films that ‘evil genius’ is a commonly known phrase, whereas there’s no such stereotype in popular culture as a ‘good genius’.
TIM ISAAC
NEXT: 9/11 - Or, the importance of witnessing
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
