Movie Review: "Admission"

"Admission": C.  I was presented with a rare opportunity to see a movie about private school admissions with a person who was the Director Of Admissions at a private school for thirty-three years. Her name is Momma Cuandito. Unfortunately the new movie, Admission, starring comedienne Tina Fey as Princeton University admissions assistant Portia Nathan, is deserving of a rejection letter. Nevertheless, if at some time in the future Momma Cuan wants to attend a movie about a lawyer who makes his living writing commercial loan documentation, I will be happy to accompany her. I'm sure a flick with such a theme would be a critically acclaimed tale and would render the audience breathless with wonder and amazement.

Princeton's Dean Of Admissions, an elderly gent played by excellent actor Wallace Shawn, has announced his retirement, and it is up to him to choose his successor from a pool of just two candidates who are his assistants, either Portia or her perfectionist peer, Corinne (Gloria Reuben). Much will depend on how each woman performs her mandate to screen this year's thousands of applications for the highly selective Ivy League school, and then make recommendations to the admissions committee for acceptance or denial. Part of each woman's duty is to familiarize herself with Princeton's "feeder schools," i.e., high schools and prep schools who have a history of sending students to Princeton. In connection with those duties, Portia finds herself slogging through the barnyard of an experimental school, New Quest, located in the New Hampshire woods. New Quest is run by John Pressman, who is played by another comedic actor, Paul Rudd. The casting of Fey and Rudd would lead to the reasonable assumption by the moviegoer that Admission will be a comedy. Such is not the case. It is not funny enough to be comedy, and not riveting or real enough to be good drama. True, there are moments when laughter is warranted, but you could count them on the fingers of one hand.

The students at New Quest are not your typical teenagers. They are quiet, humorless and at times arrogant and adversarial. John seems to advocate that manner of behavior. Portia's standard recruitment speech, in which she tells the young audience about Princeton, goes over like a lead zeppelin, but before she leaves campus John makes a point of introducing her to one of his seniors, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), whose dream is to attend Princeton. We find out later that John has an ulterior motive, unrelated to Princeton, for getting Portia and Jeremiah together. This is a key element in the story, and yet as the relationships of Portia and Jeremiah and of Portia and John unfold, the level of absurdity and unbelievability grows exponentially with each scene.

Almost all of the situations presented on film stretch credulity, the characters do not act like real people, and the dialogue between them is fake, which is another way of saying "poorly written." A case in point would be this: We are asked to believe that a person in Portia's position would not only risk her chances of getting the promotion to Dean of Admissions, but would also put her entire career in jeopardy, by committing fraud, all for the purpose of accomplishing an objective which was sure to fail anyway. Additionally, we are supposed to buy into the potential love connection between Portia and John, even though no spark is lit nor is chemistry developed between the two leads. Compare this to, say, the relationship between Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence's characters in Silver Linings Playbook. In that movie, unlike Admission, the lead guy and gal have a good vibe going between them even when she is scolding him and he is exasperated with her.

Lily Tomlin turns in an over-the-top stint as Portia's independent mother, Susannah. Most of the film's good lines are reserved for her, and the infrequent scenes in which she appears help break the tedium of the central story arc.

Momma Cuandito commented that the scenes depicting the admission committee deliberations over the worthiness of the student applicants were relatively accurate. Each committee member was expected to advocate for the prospects whom she believed would succeed at the private school. But that committee member had only one of several votes, and the majority ruled. I applaud director Paul Weitz for getting that facet of the plot right, but unless your reason for attending the movie is to get a feel for how selective colleges fill their freshmen classes from a large pool of (mostly) highly qualified applicants, I hereby suggest that your entertainment dollar could be better spent elsewhere. After two hours, I was more than ready to exit Admission.