Memorable, crazy movie

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I.Q. (1994) *** (out of 4)Tim Robbins plays Ed, a mechanic who falls in love at first site with Catherine (Meg Ryan) but she's engaged to a very rich and successful man. Not only that but she's the niece to the one and only Albert Einstein (Walter Matthau) but he takes a liking to the mechanic.If you go back through the countless films that were released through the 1990s there's no question that you will stumble across several romantic comedies like this one. After the success of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... these films were all the rage and star Ryan was the Queen of them. Whereas a lot of them are unoriginal in their approach, I.Q. on the other hand is quite the charmer.The film works so well because of the three leads who are simply wonderful. Robbins and Ryan make for such an adorable couple and their backgrounds are so wildly different that you can't help but get caught up in the story and go along with its various twists. Then you've got Matthau who really turns in one of the best performances of this later day stage of his career. The idea of getting Matthau, known for his slob-like charms, to play Einstein was perfect casting and he really adds the charm, the laughs and makes you believe and feel everything that his character is selling. The three stars have so much charm that it's really impossible not to get caught up in the story, the characters and their lives.I.Q. is a rather film that actually works on all levels. It works as a comedy. It works as a romance. It works because of the clever writing and the stars who make it shine.

I originally associated Fred Schepisi with true-life crime dramas like "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" and "A Cry in the Dark", both set in his native Australia, but he is clearly a versatile director who has also turned his hand to comedy. "I.Q." has a lot in common with "Roxanne", probably Schepisi's best-known comic movie made several years earlier. Both films are romantic comedies based upon a love- triangle with two men in love with the same woman. In both films the woman is a highly-educated intellectual, and in both one of the men tries to impress her by pretending to be more intelligent or more educated than he really is. In "Roxanne" the woman is an astronomer; here she is a mathematician, but we learn that her father was an astronomer and the appearance of comet plays an important role in both films. The action takes place in New Jersey in the 1950s. If you want to be precise, both Dwight D. Eisenhower (as President) and Albert Einstein appear as characters, so the action must take place between Ike's inauguration in January 1953 and Einstein's death in April 1955, but as the film takes a number of liberties with historical fact that sort of precision is not really necessary. (For example, Einstein is seen listening to Little Richard's "Tutti-Frutti," which was not released until after his death). The heroine is Catherine Boyd, Albert Einstein's (fictional) niece, who has obviously inherited her famous uncle's brains as she is a brilliant mathematics student at Princeton University. Her two admirers are Ed Walters, a garage mechanic, and her British fiancé James Moreland, a university lecturer in experimental psychology. As is normal in two-boys-in-love-with-one-girl type rom-coms, the two have very different personalities. Although Ed has good general intelligence he has little formal education, but is amiable and caring. James is academically brilliant but a pompous stuffed shirt who treats Catherine with patronising condescension, believing that her main function in life will be as mother to the brilliant children to be fathered by himself. Catherine's uncle Albert realises that James, for all his academic prowess, is a complete prat, so tries to persuade her that Ed would be much better suited to her. To this end he and three friends, the scientists and mathematicians Nathan Liebknecht, Kurt Gödel and Boris Podolsky, come up with a scheme to convince Catherine (and the world) that Ed is a scientific genius. The weak link as far as the acting was concerned was, in my view, Tim Robbins as Ed; l felt that the role needed someone more relaxed, less serious and younger. (The age difference between Robbins and Meg Ryan is only three years, but here it seems much greater). According to Schepisi, Robbins was unhappy with the way his character was written, feeling that nobody would like a man "who has a woman fall in love with him because of a lie", and it seems as if some of this uneasiness comes across in his performance. (There is a difference in this respect between "IQ" and "Roxanne", where it is the unsympathetic, and ultimately unsuccessful, suitor, who pretends to a level of education which he does not possess). Ryan herself, however, makes a sweet and appealing heroine. In the nineties she (along with Julia Roberts) was Hollywood's official Queen of Romantic Comedy and here she achieves the feat (as did Daryl Hannah in "Roxanne") of playing a woman who is not only attractive but also educated and intelligent without resorting to that old "bespectacled bluestocking" cliché. Walter Matthau was one of those actors who never seemed to retire, or even to fade away, but carried on taking leading roles in major feature films throughout the eighth, and final, decade of his life. Perhaps his best-known role from this period was in "Grumpy Old Men", but his Albert Einstein, portrayed as loveably mischievous, kindly and fun-loving, is far from being a grumpy old man. His three colleagues are all played in much the same way, and as being around the same age as Einstein, although historically this is not accurate. (Kurt Gödel, for example, would only have been in his forties at the time the film is set; Lou Jacobi, who plays him here, was 81 when the film was made). I wouldn't rate "IQ" quite as highly as "Roxanne", one of the best romantic comedies of the eighties, although with a stronger male lead it might have fall into the same category. Steve Martin, the male lead in "Roxanne", is one of that film's great strengths, much better than Tim Robbins is here, although on the feminine side Meg Ryan is just as good as Daryl Hannah. Overall, however, "IQ" is a highly enjoyable comedy, warm and human with its central theme that life is as much about the heart as about the mind. 7/10

Tim Robbins is oddly benign here, cast as a garage mechanic in 1950s New Jersey who falls in love with a perky blonde who turns out to be Albert Einstein's niece! Although he's on-screen much of the time, Robbins cancels out the inner-workings of his intense persona and fades into the background (it's easy to forget he's even in the picture!). Lumpy romantic comedy with a gimmick, that being Walter Matthau playing Einstein (who does what he can with a cartoonishly conceived character). Otherwise, it's sugary and sunny, directed rather drowsily by Fred Schepisi, who shows heart but no wit or brains. Meg Ryan is her usual affable self and the chemistry between she and Robbins is charming, like that of an affectionate sister and her big brother. ** from ****

It was a doubly interesting experience. For some reason the greatest scientific mind of the 20th Century had never been the central figure in a movie*. The closest I can think of as films with Einstein in them are CHAMPAIGN FOR CAESAR, where (like a "deus ex ma-china") the great man is heard clarifying a point on a radio quiz show, so that Ronald Colman is proved to have given the correct answer after all, and in BULLSHOT where the great Albert is one of a dozen leading physicists and scientists who are drugged with cannabis by the villain, intent on stealing some machines of theirs. It is notable that in those two cases, and in IQ, we are dealing with comedies. So far nobody has tried to do a serious film about the life of Einstein, like John Huston's attempt to do one on FREUD with Montgomery Cliff. I guess it is just too hard to get the world of mathematical equations or the secrets of electro-magnetic field theory into exciting dialog. But then, only three years ago Russell Crowe and Christopher Plummer did A BEAUTIFUL MIND. Maybe nobody really has tried.(*Subsequently, after writing this, I remembered the successful comedy YOUNG EINSTEIN with Yahoo Serious about ten years ago. But that is an exception and it was a spoof.)The other surprise was the actor playing the great Albert. It was Walter Matthau, here taking time away from the series of films he did with Jack Lemmon in that last decade of their careers. Matthau was a highly capable and gifted character actor, in both comedy and drama, but normally his comic personas were variants of his "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich from THE FORTUNE COOKIE. They were connivers and gonifs. Later they would shed their criminal propensities because we had grown to like them, but they remained grumpy types. But his Albert Einstein happens to be genuinely sweet. More like his Kotch than like Willie Clarke.He plays Albert as good old uncle Albert. It seems that Matthau's Einstein is living in Princeton with his niece Catherine Boyd (Meg Ryan), and she is seeing a stuffy professor named James Morland (Stephen Fry). But Fry's car needs repairs, and they take it to the auto shop where Ed Walters (Tim Robbins) works. Robbins falls for Ryan, who is attracted to him - but finds that he lacks the mental equipment that she admires. Good old uncle Albert, aided by his three friends (Lou Jacobi, Joseph Maher, and Gene Saks) decide to give their assistance to Robbins and make him an apparently unrecognized physics genius. This will open the doors of romance between him and Ryan, provided Ryan is impressed and Fry does not spoil things (as he hopes to do).The atmosphere is sweet, as when Matthau and his chums rig up a super physics quiz that they help Robbins cheat on (by switching the positions of their bodies). The plot eventually leads to the outright lie that the brilliant Robbins has constructed an atomic powered rocket ship - which brings in the interests of the nation in the figure of President Eisenhower (Keene Curtis).It was a charming comedy, and an interesting stretch for Matthau in that he was not as hyper as normal, but far more subdued.