Plot
An amiable garage mechanic, Ed Walters (Tim Robbins), meets Catherine Boyd (Meg Ryan), a beautiful Princeton University mathematics doctoral candidate, as she comes into the garage, accompanied by her stiff and fussy English fiancé, experimental psychology professor James Moreland (Stephen Fry). There is an immediate connection, but she refuses to acknowledge it. Finding a watch she left at the garage, Ed travels to her address and finds himself face to face with Albert Einstein (Walter Matthau), who is Catherine's uncle.
Albert, portrayed as a fun-loving genius who along with his mischievous friends, fellow scientists Nathan Liebknecht (Joseph Maher), Kurt Gödel (Lou Jacobi), and Boris Podolsky (Gene Saks), sees Ed as someone who would be better suited for Catherine. The four of them attempt to help Ed look and sound more like a scientist (i.e., a "wunderkind" in physics), while at the same time trying to convince Catherine that life is not all about the mind but about the heart as well. This is intended to be Einstein's most enduring legacy to his niece as he realizes that he'll not be available for her for very much longer. Catherine eventually sees through the ruse, but falls for Ed anyway. The very last image in the movie is of a smiling Albert Einstein using a small telescope to spy on the two young moonstruck lovers as they take delight in each other's company.
Read more about this topic: I.Q. (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)