Admissions
I’m not a University admissions officer, but I have had lunch with one, and watching the insider machinations of getting admitted to one of the nations top-ranked schools is part of the quirky delights of this romantic comedy. It is not, and I repeat, not a film that my fellow critics have embraced. They have criticized casting Tina Fey in the lead, the cartoonish portrayal of overachieving applicants and their anxious helicopter parents, and the Auntie Mame-style alternative prep school where students run a dairy farm, dig irrigation ditches and take classes in robotics and philosophy.
But this critic thinks Tina Fey is spot-on playing Portia Nathan, a sedate bastion of Princeton tradition with her job of 16 years, her live-in, English department boyfriend of 10 years (Michael Sheen), and her active dislike of children—especially when each of those comfortable choices are abruptly yanked away in one eventful week.
Part of my acceptance of these plot points is that I have been one of those anxious parents escorting my college-bound kids to their top-choice schools. Including a two-years-and-then-on-to-Cornell school in the desert hills on the California/Nevada border where the nearest evidence of civilization was the legal brothel just across the Nevada state line. In this wind-swept high-desert place, the all-male students raised sheep and cattle, put on Shakespeare plays in an open courtyard (because the unsafe theater was still propped up by 4x4s ever since the earthquake two years earlier), wrote complete novels or plays for their graduation papers, and shared their beds with a motley assortment of very large, and very dusty, free-range dogs.
The point of all this personal revelation is that I had no trouble believing in what director Paul Weitz portrayed onscreen.
• The principal of the alternative school (Paul Rudd) being a single parent who adopted an African child—no problem.
• The admissions officer’s mom (Lilly Tomlin) being a feisty feminist who lives by herself and assembles her own bicycle—okay by me.
• The principal championing a shot at Princeton for a brilliant, largely self-taught adopted son (Nat Wolf) of two convenience-store owners—Why not?
• The Dean of Admissions (Wallace Shawn) announcing he will be retiring soon, and that the competition for his job has narrowed to Portia and her work rival Corinne (Gloria Reuben)—It just adds dynamic tension.
• The school principal and the admissions officer having romantic feelings for each other—what do you expect? It’s a rom-com.
• The unlikely coincidences of bad timing, over compensation, embarrassing situations, and blatant disregard for hallowed Princeton traditions, the sanctity of motherhood, and law and order—well… what do you expect? It is a comedy.
The romantic part of this comedy works because Tina Fey and Paul Rudd have a nice on-screen chemistry. Portia’s job demands that she stay professionally detached from any potential conflict of interest with any applicant for admissions, and her instant attraction to an unconventional prep school’s principal causes her brain and heart to go in decidedly different directions. Rudd’s character is conflicted too. He has charted a course of year-long stays in different parts of the world, and gathered tangible evidence of those trips. From China, it is a terra-cotta horse he dug out of the mud and carried for three days through a rainstorm. From Africa, it is his now 13-year-old son. But the son, unlike the horse statue, is a living, breathing sentient being, with different hopes and dreams than his father’s. Tired of globe trekking and learning new languages and customs, the teen instantly bonds with Portia because she has stayed put in one job for more years than he has existed.
In the interests of avoiding spoilers, I won’t let you know about the numerous other events which fate (and a clever script by Karen Kroner based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel) weaves into the narrative. Let’s just say that this jaded film critic (who has seen thousands of rom-coms over the years), was delighted by all the surprising twists Admission provided.
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