I.Q.

A standard romantic comedy with a set of slightly quirky characters and a dash of physics, I.Q. assumes you didn't sleep through your high school science classes.

Minor spoilers

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
—Albert Einstein

The setting is Princeton, New Jersey in the mid-1950s. Ed Walters (Tim Robbins) is just an auto mechanic in a town full of college swells, but his thoughts are in the stars. He subscribes to popular science magazines, reads pulp sci-fi, and generally annoys his fellow mechanics with his head full of scientific trivia. But all that changes one day, when Professor James Moreland (Stephen Fry) and his fiancée Catherine Boyd (Meg Ryan) coast into the station in a finicky British automobile. Ed and Catherine's eyes meet, and he is instantly smitten: "It was like death, but in a good way," he later sighs. Further, after calling a cab, Catherine absent-mindedly leaves her pocketwatch in the shop and Ed jumps at the chance to return it to her personally.

Simple enough setup: average Joe falls for (engaged) bright young thing, and has to figure out a way to get her away from her boyfriend before they tie the knot. But here's where the movie takes a slight twist—when Ed visits Catherine's house, the door is answered by none other than Albert Einstein (Walter Matthau), who just happens to be Catherine's uncle. The two talk for a while, and Einstein introduces the mechanic to some of his cronies—Kurt Gödel (Lou Jacobi), Boris Podolsky (Gene Saks) and Nathan Liebknecht (Joseph Maher)—three of the greatest scientific minds of their day, "and amongst them, they can't change a lightbulb."

Einstein & Co. swiftly decide that Ed is a much better match for Catherine than Prof. Moreland, a passionless snob who performs semi-sadistic psychological experiments on humans and animals alike. The real trouble is Ed's lack of education, so they decide to spiff him up as a sort of natural scientific savant with a brilliant new idea about cold fusion (cribbed from one of Einstein's unpublished papers). As can be expected, things quickly get out of hand, but not before Catherine begins to fall for Ed.

I.Q. is a movie worth watching for the quality of the dialogue alone. There are some marvelous exchanges in this movie—any time the four scientific cronies discuss the nature of existence, some of the parallel-play dialogue between Catherine and her odious fiancé, and the utterly bourgeois Louis Bamberger (Charles Durning) praising the merits of Spike Jones and "modern technology." It also has a fair smattering of scientific and mathematical concepts—relativity, Zeno's paradox—but in language nearly any adult can understand.

Tim Robbins does a fair job as mechanic Ed Walters, suffusing the role with a slightly dazed quality which does not seem out of character. Meg Ryan draws on her stock "cutely quirky" characterization and adds a nice absent-minded twist, but it's difficult to believe her character is as truly brilliant as everyone claims. Walter Matthau makes a sweet and quite believable, if somewhat doddering, Einstein. The real show-stealers, though, are Jacobi, Saks and Maher, as a sort of thinking-man's version of the Three Stooges. These three old codgers are irresistible.

The only real problem I have with this film is the ending, which seems terribly contrived, as though it were tacked on solely for the sake of a swift and happy resolution. What came before it clearly indicates that the scriptwriters can do better.

When it was first released to theaters ten years ago, I.Q. met with mixed reviews. Some critics complained it was an "in-between" film—too cerebral for a date movie and too lowbrow for the art-house crowd. Further, Tim Robbins was not yet considered leading man material, and the critics didn't know what to make of him. Mostly due to some critical panning, couples who might otherwise have enjoyed this movie missed seeing it the first time around. Happily, it is now finally available on DVD as well as VHS.

As Einstein would say, "Wahoo."

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