With Honors

Sometimes an ambitious college student just doesn't know which way to go with his or her studies. The same is sometimes true of comedy films. With Hon­ors just can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a sassy spoof on mis­guided intellectualism, or a sweet weepy on loves both lost and found. It ends up not being much of either, an indecisiveness that ultimately drags the movie's grade point average down to a C+.

The collegiate paper chase is the under­pinning to the story in With Hon­ors. It's winter semester at Har­vard, and Brendan Fraser (the defrost­ed caveman in Encino Man) is midway through his thesis on gov­ernment adminis­tration. His work is a shameless suck-up to the elitist theories of his academic advi­sor (Gore Vidal) — which is how Fraser plans to graduate summa cum laude. But he drops the ball when he loses the the whole text down a heating grate.

Not that the thesis is lost. It simply ends up in the hands of Joe Pesci (who's appearing in virtually every other currently released movie). This time, Pesci plays a widely traveled, street-smart bum who's looking to cut a deal for food and shelter. With the clock ticking toward graduation, Fraser is forced to play — he offers Pesci space in an abandoned van behind the house he shares with three roomies, in exchange for the return of his paper. (The deal is one day's use of the van for each page of the thesis.)

At this point, With Honors generally clicks as a vaguely amusing and predictable comedy in which Pesci knows more about real life than any of the students and begins to one-up Vidal in the classroom. He also starts advising Fraser about how to handle his love life, beginning with the basic obser­vation that Fraser needs to get one.

But With Honors isn't satisfied with simply being a comedy. Just as it's about to work as an Ivy League version of My Man Godfrey, it suddenly flip-flops into a teary-eyed mix of Stella Dallas and Terms of Endearment. Pesci is dying and he has yet to reconcile the greatest failing of his life, his abandonment, 30 years earlier, of his wife and sons.

Neither fish nor fowl, With Honors meanders through its last half. It stumbles on a few cliches but, to its credit, sidesteps a few as well. Unfortunately, it never quite gels, ending with a whimper instead of a bang.