Former ad-director Noam Murro and novelist-turned-screenwriter Mark Poirier make their big screen debuts with this well-cast comedy drama.

And, while dysfunctional families may be two-a-penny in indie cinema, the presence of Sideways' Thomas Haden Church and Juno's Ellen Page in the cast, should give Smart People a real advantage over the competition.

Widowed English Lit professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is a shambling, self-absorbed mess, sleep-walking through his life at work and home.

His son James (Ashton Holmes) studies at his father’s University but avoids him whenever possible, while 18-year-old daughter Vanessa (Page) is a micro-managing control freak, a drearily dressed, friendless Young Republican hiding behind her perfect grades.

Climbing a fence to avoid paying to release his impounded car, Lawrence falls and hits his head. His emergency doctor Janet Hartigan (Parker) – also a former student and admirer - bans him from driving for six months.

Enter Chuck (Church), Lawrence’s hard-up adoptive brother who offers to chauffeur his surly sibling if he’s allowed to move in for the duration.

Chuck is a permanent adolescent, forever enthusing about his latest get-rich-quick scheme while looking for a hand-out from his brother. But he is perfectly happy in his apparent failures and his cheery carelessness forces his family to face up to their self-inflicted misery.

There's little here in the way of real action; relationships progress by inches rather than leaps and bounds and personal epiphanies arrive with a whimper, not a bang.

The main characters, except for the irrepressible Chuck, believe that intellectual superiority makes them better than everyone else.

They are pompous, selfish, and simply too difficult for audiences to care about, making their journeys towards self-awareness and some measure of happiness unrewarding and - even worse - uninteresting.

Quaid does well in hiding his leading man looks beneath sloping shoulders, a paunch and a permanently disappointed expression, while star-on-the-rise Page adds a caustically conservative twist to her precocious Juno persona.

But it all feels like it's been done before, and, despite a clever script and the uniformly strong performances from a talented cast, Smart People is never more than a sum of its parts.

Not as smart as it thinks.

Ruth Ford