I.Q. Staring Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Walter Matthau and Stephen Fry. Director Fred Schepisi. Category I. Opens on March 19 at Happy, Miramar, Mongkok Broadway, New York, Tsuen Wan Broadway, UA Queensway, UA Sha Tin, UA Times Square, UA Whampoa.
THE best moment in this pleasant but forgettable film comes very early on. After a number of teasing back shots and quarter profiles we are confronted, full frontal, with Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein. It's Matthau all right, but it is also undeniably Einstein.
In full wig and wardrobe, the resemblance is quite extraordinary, and Matthau's peerless gifts as a comic character actor ensure he makes the best of what should have been the role of a lifetime. Perhaps one day, in another film, it will be.
The publicity blurb claims I.Q. fondly evokes the work of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Well ... kind of, though neither would have worked with a script and scenario as make-do as this, certainly not Sturges. He would have insisted on much serious rewriting and at least some shadow of a reason for making it.
As it stands, all I.Q. has to offer is the Matthau-Einstein connection, and the pure commercial potential inherent in Meg Ryan again acting cute and pixie-faced - and this time in bobby sox! So what is I.Q. about? Well, I can tell you how long it is and ... er, well ... that's all there is to know. The whole thing is as shiny and insubstantial as gold leaf - pretty enough, but serving no purpose beyond the decorative. All the little things, those telling period details - inanimate extras like shiny Buicks and 1950s-deco soda fountains - are, as one would expect, perfect to a tee. And they do indeed 'evoke' the kind of innocent and carefree times necessary to airy romantic comedies like this one.
Whether the university town of Princeton was, even in the early '50s, such a jolly little Eden is doubtful but not important. What I.Q. offers is Einstein's Adventures In Sweet Suburbia - the zany, off-beat home life of America's favourite absent-minded professor. Here the Great Mind and his equally brilliant academic emigres dodder and bicker like so many retired salesmen twilighting in Miami Beach.