Movies
I.Q.
Fred Schepisi's loose and lagging companion to his Roxanne: slightly brainy, slightly barmy romantic comedies. In this one, Albert Einstein plays Cupid to his mathematician niece and a nice young auto mechanic conversant with cosmic questions by way of the sci-fi pulps. Walter Matthau, flanked by a trio of fellow longhairs interpreted as strudel cooks, gives us the Einstein of the T-shirts: comfy and cozy. And Meg Ryan, done over as though by Melanie Griffith's hairdresser, is no less out of her depth as the mathematician than Daryl Hannah was as the astronomer in Roxanne. Whether she's supposed to be adorably absent-minded or fetchingly fretful or endearingly eccentric, it all comes out as (her standard strategy) a little tipsy. Where the movie most closely approximates the charms of Roxanne is in the pastoral buoyancy of its cinematography. Credit Ian Baker, both places. With Tim Robbins, Stephen Fry, Charles Durning. 1994.
— Duncan Shepherd
Reader Rating:
- MPAA Rating: PG
