For a film about decisions, Admission (2013) can’t seem to make up its mind. Is Paul Weitz’s comedy a farce about the Ivy League admissions process, a cringe comedy about one woman’s regimented life unravelling, or a meditation on missed opportunities and unconventional families? Like an over-eager student’s personal essay, the film tries to cram in too much and ends up a confused mess—a heap of good ideas without any structure.
Strait-laced Princeton University admissions officer Portia Nathan (Tina Fey) spends her days contending with the horde of anxious parents “who just realized there isn’t room for every organically fed, well-tutored offspring” at one of the most prestigious colleges in the world. Her life is a well-worn rut encompassing only Princeton and her undemanding, somewhat demeaning, relationship with a weak-willed academic (Michael Sheen). However, when Portia visits an alternative high school as part of her student recruiting drive, her tidy world is upended by an easy-going principal (Paul Rudd), his unusual star student (Nat Wolff) and the chance of being reunited with the child she lost long ago.
Admission aims at occupying the same “quirky indie comedy” niche as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, but is far too uneven to succeed. In the space of a few scenes, cringe comedy is followed by melancholy desperation, only to be jettisoned for the sake of a cheap laugh: after Portia’s boyfriend dumps and humiliates her in front of all their colleagues, she retreats into a desperate fantasy about all the students who still need her and is then discovered, tear-stained and unkempt, the next morning.
Not that the film can’t be genuinely funny—it can, but not always when it wants to be. One of Weitz’s and screenwriter Karen Croner’s more ingenious ideas is to present imaginary versions of each student as admissions officers read their applications. An overly-supplicant essay is matched with a girl praying on her knees, while a champion gymnast tries to persuade Portia while contorting on top of her desk—unsuccessful applicants are unceremoniously dumped through a trap door.
If only the rest of the movie were as inventive.
Few actresses do “uptight with a self-deprecating streak” better than Tina Fey. Portia prunes her bonsai tree to the point of extinction and blows microscopic specks of dirt off her desk with a can of compressed air. When her boss (an underused Wallace Shawn) announces his impending retirement, she is forced to compete with an equally obsessive colleague (Gloria Reuben) for the position and is driven to new heights of lunacy. Yet viewers can be forgiven for feeling that they have seen it all before. Portia is simply a more subdued version of Fey’s 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon and although Croner adapted the script from a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, much of the screenplay seems bound by the mantra, “What Would Liz Lemon Do?”: scenes such as Portia aggressively offering to hold a baby so its mother can reach something on a high shelf would have fit neatly into 30 Rock.
The script also makes few demands of most of the cast. Always charming, Paul Rudd acquits himself well as principal John Pressman, a blithe spirit so convinced of his authority to involve himself in other people’s lives that he rarely stops to consider the damage. Lily Tomlin also does her best as Portia’s feminist Amazon of a mother, whose seemingly unassailable facade hides decades of loneliness. However, special praise must be reserved for Nat Wolff as Jeremiah, an endearingly odd genius trying to get into Princeton and Travaris Spears as Pressman’s precocious adopted son.
Admission leans heavily on a likeable cast in an attempt to compensate for its lack of focus. But like many of the Princeton applicants in the film, it is simply trying too hard.
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