Wetherhold, a bearded grouch, has just finished his latest book, which as the movie opens is on its way to oblivion.
He has a strained relationship with his two children and embarks on a precarious romance with a local emergency-room physician that only threatens to send him further into his antisocial shell.
Smart People marks the feature debut of director Noam Murro and screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier.
But this new film bears an uncanny resemblance to movies that have gone before: When Murro cuts to an establishing shot of Wetherhold's stately Pittsburgh rowhouse, viewers will be forgiven for expecting to see Michael Douglas, circa Wonder Boys in 2000, flop out to the front porch dressed in his frowsy pink bathrobe.
It's a cinematic archetype as reliable as the fish out of water and the blonde in distress: the dishevelled misanthropic college professor, in the throes of writer's block (or some other form of publish-or-perish anxiety), living in book-lined solitude as a result of divorce, death or free-floating disgust with humanity.
There's little doubt why academia provides such a tempting backdrop for filmmakers (and novelists: David Lodge has made a cottage industry of sending up the ivory tower).
As a wag once observed, the backbiting and politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so low.
What better fodder for exploring human behaviour at its most extreme, petty, adulterous, borderline homicidal and, finally, ridiculous?
Douglas' Wonder Boys character, the pot-smoking, psychologically blocked creative writing professor Grady Tripp, was a particularly amusing apotheosis of the type.
But he was just one in a long line of memorable predecessors and successors: Think of rumpled Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Or stentorian John Houseman in The Paper Chase.
Or pedantic, dyspeptic and philandering Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale.
Most recently, a professor's long-ago affair with a student provided a plot point in the drama Away From Her, and Philip Seymour Hoffman put his own lovable sad-sack spin on the character in The Savages.
Richard Jenkins, known for his supporting work in films (Flirting With Disaster, Rumor Has It) and television (Six Feet Under), is getting his big starring break as a lonely economics professor who embarks on a journey of connection and self-discovery in the new film The Visitor.
Poirier, who wrote Smart People, originally conceived of the project as a novel that would draw on his experience both as the son of a college professor and as a college instructor himself, most recently at Bennington.
One advantage to making his protagonist a literature professor, he says, was that he could endow the character with eloquence and self-awareness without straining credulity.
At a pivotal point, for instance, Wetherhold tells another character that he has not had any "great epiphanies" or made "sweeping changes" to his personality.
"That's something a professor would say," Poirier says.
"They're living in a world of literature, a world where they're thinking about epiphanies and character changes all the time. So it seems natural that they'd apply that to themselves."
In other ways, the bored or blocked professor - teaching the same texts in the same rooms to the same if interchangeable students, day in, day out, semester after semester - perfectly embodies the ennui of any job.
But in this case, that job brings the added value of involving performance.
Thus the professor is the ideal personification of inertia without inertness, suggests Poirier.
"He's on stage every day."
Poirier acknowledges similarities between Smart People and Wonder Boys, adding that he deliberately did not make Wetherhold a creative-writing professor.
"I think that creative-writing teachers have a reputation - at least within English departments - of being anti-intellectuals," he explains.
"And they also have a reputation of sleeping with their students, like in The Squid and the Whale." - Ann Hornaday
