BEFORE: Wallace Shawn carries over from "My Dinner With Andre", completing a hat trick. Movie Year #6 is now 80% done, and the schedule for the last 60 films of the year is now set in stone with the addition of two missing Stephen King films to the horror chain. Encore channel is running King-based films all month, which helps me out. So two classic films get bumped into next year, and I closed up the gap they left all nice and tidy.
THE PLOT: A Princeton admissions officer who is up for a major promotion takes a professional risk after she meets a college-bound alternative school kid who just might be the son she gave up years ago in a secret adoption.
AFTER: I'm a little torn on this one because it feels like a smart comedy, and I tend to like smart comedies over dumb ones (like, say, "Clueless" or "Dumb & Dumber"), but this one ended up firing in a few different directions at once, and I also get the feeling that if I start listing nitpick points, the whole thing's going to unravel. Let me say right off that I like the title, and the fact that it has a double meaning - it's not just about admission to college, the lead character has to make an admission about her past.
Now, it's based on an incredible set of coincidences - the guy who's leading the alternative high-school in New Hampshire just happens to be based right near where the female lead grew up, and he just happened to have dated her roommate, who just happened to tell him about her secret pregnancy, and even though he's traveled all over the world and done many things and had his own distractions in life, he just happened to remember her name and situation all these years. The fact that he's encountered an adopted teen that's attending his school is another huge coincidence, and the fact that the kid seems smart enough to go to Princeton is another, and her working in the Princeton admissions office is another - you see what I mean? That's at least 7 huge coincidences coming together, just in the set-up.
If you can take all that in, however, then we come to the romance part. It's hard to tell where this film lands on the battle of the sexes, though, because so few characters seem to be able to make a relationship work. People break up, people get together for one-night stands, people have kids out of wedlock - OK, maybe it's an accurate reflection of what really goes down these days, maybe not, but in a movie I think people tend to want simpler portrayals of relationships. There's a way to write a break-up scene, for example, and this just doesn't cut it.
However, the developing relationship between the admissions officer and the high-school teacher is fairly well written - here we something akin to the "rule of opposites" displayed in "My Dinner With Andre". One person has been at the same job for 16 years, the other's been all over the world working for various charitable causes. One is more corporate and tightly-wound in her thinking, the other one is free-wheeling and loose in his. One gave her child up for adoption, the other one adopted a son. And they frequently disagree the whole time that they may be falling for each other. This feels like it sort of rings true, it's a complex version of "opposites attract", and it's worth taking note of if you're about to write a screenplay about complex relationships.
The film then tries to give us a look inside the complex process of college admissions, and even though we're told all along that kids are more than their grades and their essays, and the admissions committee is going to take their extra-curricular activities and personalities into account, it then turns out that the process is exactly as draconian and brutally simple as one might think. WTF? The technique of having the teens appear in the room seems innovative, but then using post effects to have trap doors open under them when they're rejected just drives home the severeness of the process. Couldn't the same effect have been achieved by putting a photo of the applicant up on a bulletin board, or using a PowerPoint presentation? It's an odd place to use visual effects in a film, that's all.
I felt all along that what was taking place constituted a HUGE conflict of interest. If the admissions counselor truly believed that this teenager could be her son, she should have immediately stopped working on his file. Or taken the time to be 100% certain about his lineage, because then she would know whether what she was doing was wrong or not. I then reasoned out that there was only one way her story could go, and I was right - I'm not sure if this means I'm getting better at figuring out plots, or the movie just painted itself into a corner with only one way out.
And all along, I got the feeling that the movie was trying to display "heart", but just didn't quite know how to do that. From this I deduce that writing films about relationships might be harder to do than most writers realize.
NITPICK POINT: Princeton is in New Jersey, and the alt high-school was in New Hampshire. Characters moved between these two locales in this film like it was no big deal, but that's probably a 5 or 6-hour car trip. To people in California it probably doesn't look like much of a distance on the map, but it is.
Also starring Tina Fey (last seen in "Anchorman 2"), Paul Rudd (last seen in "Clueless"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Midnight in Paris"), Gloria Reuben (last seen in "Lincoln"), Nat Wolff, Lily Tomlin (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Christopher Evan Welch (last seen in "The Master"), Travaris Spears, Sonya Walger, Olek Krupa.
RATING: 5 out of 10 lawn jockeys
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