Film Review: Hugh Grant visits familiar territory in ‘The Rewrite’

In “The Rewrite,” Hugh Grant plays Keith Michaels, a Hollywood screenwriter on the skids. Keith won an Oscar for “Paradise Misplaced” some 15 years earlier. His next two films bombed, and now he’s so broke that he has to take a job teaching screenwriting at a small college in Binghamton, New York. Will he regain his mojo through teaching? Will he disrupt the college? Will he find love? (You can guess the answers.)

The character is extremely similar to the ex-pop star Grant played in the so-so 2007 comedy “Music and Lyrics,” which, as it happens, was written and directed by Marc Lawrence, the writer/director of “The Rewrite.” (Lawrence has directed four features, all of them starring Grant.) While Grant has better chemistry with Marisa Tomei here than he did with Drew Barrymore in the earlier film, “Music and Lyrics” had the advantage of a bunch of memorable tunes, several of them courtesy of Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne.

If there is a major difference in the characters, it’s that Keith is significantly less sympathetic. He shows up at the campus with no preparation and a bad attitude. He sleeps with an undergraduate within the first reel; he arrogantly offends an uptight English professor (Allison Janney), who just happens to chair the Faculty Ethics committee; and, rather than read the work of the applicants to his class, he simply picks the prettiest women in the batch, plus (to ineffectively mask his priorities) two guys who are major league nerds. (When Keith accidentally characterizes one of them to his face, the student says, “Are you kidding? I aspire to nerd.”)

The story also supplies Keith a more age-appropriate potential girlfriend in Holly (Marisa Tomei), a waitress/student with more than the usual amount of plain-folks wisdom.

Backing up the stars is the always enjoyable J.K. Simmons (who will presumably have a Best Supporting Actor Oscar soon for his work in “Whiplash”) as the department head — an ex-Marine who weeps with joy every time he thinks about his family. (Referring to the Janney character, he says, “I wouldn’t want to go up against her, and I was in Desert Storm.”) Chris Elliott (“Cabin Boy,” “Get a Life”) is not quite as effective as a geek professor, largely because his character is so thinly written.

There’s nothing much wrong with “The Rewrite,” except that Grant is playing his character identically to almost every other character he’s played in the last 20 years. Even though Keith acts condescendingly to everyone at first, he’s still stutteringly self-effacing. (Big surprise.) Once in a great while, Grant breaks away from his stock character — as in the underappreciated “American Dreamz” and “An Awfully Big Adventure” — but his work in “The Rewrite” is altogether familiar.

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).