It's 1973. It's Ohio. Clive (David Call) is a twenty-eight year old high school student who wears his hair like Veronica Lake, stores his beard in the basement, and is a rude little snot. In particular, he adopts an attitude of overwhelmingly smug superiority towards his family, (and beyond...he is more arrogant than thirty 19th Century Prussian noblemen combined), spouts truisms as though they are profundities, and has a habit of answering polite, direct questions in one of the following manners:
1. Ignores the questioner entirely.
2. Asks the questioner a provocative, smarmy, personal question that entirely evades the original query.
3. Treats the questioner to a pompous load of esoteric bs with the implication that his answer is beyond them.
4. Responds with one or two words in Hungarian, a language he pretends to have invented, and apparently, has made it through seventeen or eighteen years of this affected crap without encountering anyone smart enough to call him on it.
However, Clive is entitled because he's a genius, particularly in math. We know this because we see him do things like use a soldering iron and attach an antenna to a toaster, (lord knows why), and because we see him in a gymnasium finishing a math exam first while his family anxiously looks on from the bleachers. (Of course, Clive, being Clive, plops his exam (in a blue book, of all things) down with a smack, struts away with body language clearly implying contempt for the procedure, and kicks the wooden gym door open with a loud bang even though the rest of the participants are still working.)
(Just by the way, one learns to expect bad science and math in movies, but mathematics is not extracting square roots or computing numerical logarithms or enumerating the primes between 900 and 950, and mathematics competitions contain none of that kind of stuff as problems. Its been many years, but I recall an easy one from one of the Putnam exams: A common calculus mistake is to assume that the product rule for derivatives is (fg)' = f'g'. If f(x) = exp (-x^2), find a continuous function g(x), such that this wrong product rule is right.*)
Apparently Clive's mathematical genius didn't emerge until late in his high school career, because had it appeared earlier, anyone like him who thinks math is based on "absolute certainty," (no, it isn't), "knows everything about it," (impossible), and considers it finite and structurally self-evident, "like a cathedral," (way off the mark), would long since have placed out of any standard curriculum and at least be doing doctoral research.
His family isn't that much better. Mom and Dad, to prove they aren't too outclassed by their gifted child, are in the habit of dropping arcane quotes cribbed from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in a manner that conclusively demonstrates they don't know what they are talking about. They also exhibit more than a smattering of the classic crank syllogism: "Galileo was persecuted, Darwin was vilified, Newton was not understood, all of them were right; I am ignored, vilified and misunderstood, therefore I am right too."
Mom considers herself a cultural maven because she categorically rejects rock and roll and knows that Chopin was Polish. However, the paintings on the walls are so bad they make 'Dogs Playing Poker' look like Landseer. She lies to her younger son by telling him he is just as special and gifted in music when he stumbles over the opening phrases of Debussy's Clair de Lune on the piano, then proceeds to inform him that having a genius brother is a "lifetime commitment."
When Dad, (William Hurt, out-mumbling David Duchovny in this film), who is in the insurance business, makes a rather gentle dinner table explanation of the value of what he does, (probably motivated by some understandable insecurity), Clive accuses him of "lying to his family." Instead of clonking the ungrateful jackass on the head, (that comes later and for the wrong reason), and reminding him that his food, shelter, clothing, guitar, amps, grass, bong money and so forth is provided by Dad's "lying" profession, (Clive obviously is too brilliant to work), it is DAD who leaves the table and says something conciliatory.
Younger brother is constantly patronized by Clive but is even-tempered to the point of idiocy, actually thanking him for "taking him" on an outing with Clive's lover and Clive's beard, where they laugh at him for not understanding Hungarian and dose him with a small sugar cookie laced with so little grass that he can't taste it. (A Pomeranian would be hard pressed to catch a buzz but brother blisses out.) To be fair, little brother does get to sleep with the beard, (who looks remarkably healthy for someone who lives behind the basement furnace and subsists almost exclusively on citrus fruit -- although her diet would preclude scurvy one still would expect a Dickensian waif living in the slums of London sewing silk flowers by candlelight until her eyesight fails), but this fluid transfer occurs unexpectedly and well after the "thanks" are tendered.
The most untenable thing about this movie is that I think we are supposed to care about these people and feel bad when Clive dies of AIDS. I must be heartless because I wished those stupid wings we see at the beginning and end had snapped off and that he had crashed and burned right from the start.
Hilary Swank should stick to fisticuffs.
XYZ
* Solution (sketch): (fg)' = f'g + fg' = f'g' --> f'g = (f'-f)g' --> g'/g = f'/(f'-f) = -2xf(/(-2xf-f) = 2x/(1+2x) since f=/=0. Now note that g'/g is the logarithmic derivative of abs(g) and integrate both sides. (The interesting mathematical content raised by this problem is determining necessary and sufficient conditions on f such that a solution, g, exists. Clearly f=exp(R(x)), R(x)=p(x)/q(x), p(x),q(x) e F{X}, q=/=0, (p,q)=1 will work, but that's just an obvious generalization of the original problem.)
