The Rewrite (2014)

The Rewrite arrives as the fourth collaboration between Marc Lawrence and Hugh Grant, which is itself a kind of confession. Grant plays Keith Michaels, a screenwriter whose sole triumph came fifteen years ago, now reduced to teaching screenwriting at Binghamton University. He selects his students largely on their appearance, insults Jane Austen within earshot of a colleague, and dismisses his class for a month. The film regards all of this with a tolerant shrug, confident that a man of a certain age and a certain accent will be forgiven by the second act.

The film does notice its protagonist's behavior. A student publicly calls out his incompetence. A female professor registers her objection to his remarks. These are real gestures, and they earn the picture a modest credit in the ledger of social awareness. The machinery underneath never shifts, though. Holly, the single mother who sets him right, exists to be wise at him. Her inner life is thin enough to read a newspaper through. Keith's transformation is the only transformation on offer, and the women arrange themselves around it like furniture in a faculty lounge.

Elsewhere the picture is content to be a comedy about teaching, with speeches about effort and passion that gesture toward uplift without ever naming a social ill. There is no racial reckoning, no environmental anxiety, no examination of wealth or the body or the mind's varied wiring. The Hollywood satire stays personal and toothless. So we have a gentle redemption story for a charming man, faintly aware of its own dated politics and entirely unwilling to do anything about them. It is pleasant. It is also inert.