I.Q. (film)

Princeton mathematics doctoral candidate Catherine Boyd and her hyper-critical British fiancé, experimental psychology professor James Moreland, enter a nearby garage after their car breaks down. Ed Walters, a science-fiction hobbyist mechanic, falls in love with Catherine at first sight and is blatantly enthralled by her, which she pointedly ignores.

Inside the garage, Ed excitedly tells his fellow mechanics that he envisions their future together, their marriage and kids. Catherine comes in and, rattled by Ed's attention, jumbles her words, but he understands her perfectly. Finding a watch that Catherine accidentally left, Ed goes to her address, coming face to face with Albert Einstein, Catherine's uncle. Albert and his mischievous friends, scientists Nathan Liebknecht, Kurt Gödel and Boris Podolsky, accept Ed as a friend after he answers a philosophical question about time and retrieves one of their badminton rackets from a tree.

Ed tells them that when he and Catherine met, time slowed down and he had a moment of clarity. The scientists see him as someone better suited for her. Ed takes Einstein to the university on his motorcycle to find Catherine. Although unsuccessful in getting a date with her, he makes her laugh. At a university dinner, James and Catherine discuss their differing views. He describes an academic and intellectual experience for their honeymoon. In contrast, she describes a sensual one in Hawaii. James pulls her aside, berating her, so she accuses him of not loving her. Catherine arrives home and tells Albert about James's plan for them: He will be a full professor at Stanford, while she is resigned to being a homemaker and full-time mother.

The four scientists have Ed's garage transform their car into a convertible, brainstorming about how Ed can pique Catherine's interest. Ed, who barely got through high school, jokingly asks to "borrow their brains", inspiring them to give him a makeover and portray him as a hidden genius. They take a paper about cold fusion that Albert wrote in 1925 but never published because he could not get the math to work, and they pose it as a concept developed by Ed. Catherine finds Ed apparently discussing his idea of a nuclear fusion space shuttle engine with them. She talks him into presenting its paper at a symposium at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.

Ed stumbles through his memorized presentation, and they get away with it. At a reception afterward, the scientists bring Catherine and Ed together alone under the stars. When James arrives, Albert feigns a heart attack, asking Catherine and Ed to drive him home for his pills, then produces them from his pocket. The three stop at a café to get out of the rain. Catherine senses Ed's feelings for her and tries to leave, but Albert distracts her. Playing a waltz on the jukebox, he has Ed cut in. They briefly dance but suddenly leave when she remembers that James is expecting her.

James challenges Ed in front of the press to do a very public set of intelligence tests. After solving the manual puzzles quickly, Ed is subjected to 50 questions on advanced physics. The four scientists in the audience easily solve the questions and prompt him with the answers. As a result, he is rated with an I.Q. of 186. The discovery of genius Ed is published in the newspapers and cinema newsreels, pleasing Catherine. However, going over calculations in Ed's (actually Albert's) paper, she sees something that is off and approaches her uncle. Albert causes her to doubt her suspicions to protect the ruse. Catherine becomes distraught, but before she leaves, Ed insists that she is more intelligent than she believes.

Uncle Albert arranges for a small sailing excursion with James, Catherine, Ed and himself, but the scientists detain James so that he does not show. Albert, steering the boat, sneakily knocks her off balance so that she falls into Ed's lap. Catherine, struggling to come to grips with her feelings, finally says that she loves him, and they kiss.

At the garage, Ed admits to his co-workers that he still has not told Catherine the truth. At the same time, she realizes that it was all a lie. President Eisenhower arrives, pleased with the supposed nuclear fusion engine that will overtake a rumored project similar to a Russian project. On his motorcycle, Ed catches up with the presidential motorcade and meets Catherine in a field. She scolds him but realizes that the president and his staff believe that he is proposing. Flustered, she tells him to kiss her. He does and tells her that she had fallen in love with him at first sight also, but that they had to devise the ruse to convince her. Catherine slaps him and returns to the motorcade.

Realizing that she has learned of the ruse, Albert admits to Catherine that she has finally seen through the "intellectual Ed" ruse. He congratulates her on mathematically disproving his theory of 30 years ago, something that he could not do because he is terrible at math. This further reinforces Catherine's self-confidence. At the symposium, James accuses Albert Einstein and Ed Walters of fraud, but Albert turns the tables on him. He says that "Operation Red Cabbage" was their plan to prove that the Russians were lying about their nuclear fusion advances in space, and that Catherine Boyd and Ed Walters were key in proving it.

Albert is rushed to the hospital for a real emergency and asks Catherine at his bedside to listen to her heart and not let her head keep her from love. Ed arrives, apologizes to Catherine and leaves, telling her that he hopes that one day, she will realize that she is extraordinary. A comet is due on the night of April 1. Catherine goes to Stargazers' Field to view it and sees Ed already there. They watch the comet together and Catherine admits that she has fallen for Ed.

For dramatic reasons, I.Q. fictionalizes the lives of certain real people. Albert Einstein did not have a niece by the name of Catherine Boyd. Kurt Gödel was famously shy and reclusive,^[2] unlike his fictional counterpart in this film. The movie gives the impression that Einstein and his friends are all around the same age, when in fact, they were between 17 and 30 years younger than Einstein.^{[citation needed]} The real Louis Bamberger died in 1944, before the film's set period.

The characters in the film listen to Little Richard's "Tutti-Frutti", which was released in November 1955, although Albert Einstein died the previous April.

Director Fred Schepisi later said that although he liked the film, it was not what it could have been:

The problem was there were two other producers, there was a studio and there was Tim Robbins and they were all contributing, and Tim Robbins was being difficult because he said in the '90s nobody would like a character who has a woman fall in love with him because of a lie. That's the whole premise of the film. And it's all right for him to know that and believe it, but he should spend the whole time trying to say, "Hey, I'm lying to you," and be constantly frustrated. Because of that attitude, he pulled the film this way, he pulled it that way while we were writing and it just felt messy. And nobody ever understood the value of those four scientists, and I like the cast that I had, but the other three scientists apart from Walter Matthau were originally going to be Peter Ustinov, Barry Humphries and John Cleese. I wanted them all the way through, but nobody understood how strong they would be. Nobody understood that with a garage and the scientists and this other guy, if you could just stay within that world, if you kept your two lovers together all the time under pressure and you do lots of silly things—there were a couple of wonderfully silly things when they were trying to prove his theory and they kept blowing things up—it had that whimsy about it that would have kept the lovers together and under tension. If they want subplots, they up the stakes and all this formulaic crap - and that's the problem.^[3]

I.Q. opened in theaters on Christmas Day. It grossed $3,131,201 during its opening weekend, ranking eighth at the US box office.^[4] By the time that the film closed, it had grossed $26,381,221 in the United States and Canada.^[5] It grossed $47 million worldwide.^[1]

The film received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, I.Q. holds a 45% rating, based on 29 reviews.^[6]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3½ stars out of 4, with glowing praise of Walter Matthau's performance. "Matthau as Einstein is a stroke of casting genius. He looks uncannily like the great mathematician. Whether he acts like him I am not in a position to say, but he certainly doesn't act like himself: He has left all his Matthauisms behind, and created this performance from scratch, and it's one of the year's genuine comic gems. He deserves an Oscar nomination."^[7]

• 9th – David Elliott, The San Diego Union-Tribune^[8]
• "The second 10" (not ranked) – Sean P. Means, The Salt Lake Tribune^[9]

• List of films about mathematicians

• I.Q. at IMDb
• I.Q. at AllMovie
• I.Q. at Box Office Mojo
• I.Q. at Rotten Tomatoes
• I.Q. film script - Dialogue Transcript