Main actors fail to deliver in Admission
No key comic moments
Admission
Starring: Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Nat Wolff Directed by: Paul Weitz Running time: 105 minutes
Parental guidance: Coarse language, sexual situations
Playing at: Angrignon, Banque Scotia, Brossard,
Cavendish, Colossus, Kirkland, Quartier Latin, Sphèretech, St. Eustache,
Taschereau
Getting into Princeton University is a particularly American rite, an Ivy League ticket to valuable contacts, job opportunities and future success. The equivalent in Canada, outside Quebec, would be early French immersion, which comes with similarly fraught yearnings: limited space, long lineups, desperate parents, stressed-out kids.
In Admission, Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, the gatekeeper to all this anxiety. She’s an admissions officer at Princeton, a fussy workaholic who cleans her desk with an aerosol air can, trims her Bonsai tree to death and frets over the files of high school applicants (“perfectly nurtured and organically fed”) with dreams of that golden Princeton degree.
Portia’s world is about to tip upside down, a development that also tips Fey — and indeed the entire picture — into a maelstrom of mixed tones, casual sentiment, confused motives and the occasional adult development. Admission is a dramedy, that awkward combination of the almost-comic with the near-emotional, leaving room for Fey to be both ironically self-deprecating and pseudo-sentimental.
It comes with several crises. The first is that Clarence (Wallace Shawn), the head of admissions, is about to retire and Portia finds herself competing with the aggressive Corinne (Gloria Reuben) for his job. At the same time, the almost pathologically unwed Portia (her view on children is, “They’re like pit bulls. They smell fear”) is being abandoned by her longtime boyfriend (Michael Sheen) for another woman, a Virginia Woolf scholar who not only wants a family, but is already pregnant. With twins.
The real problem, however, comes when Portia hears from John Pressman (Paul Rudd), a teacher at the alternative New Quest School, where children might attend Third World Development classes and learn how to design a sustainable irrigation system. John has a student, the brilliant Jeremiah (Nat Wolff, and no relation to Virginia), whom he thinks is an ideal candidate for Princeton. Furthermore, John has good reason to believe that Jeremiah is the son who Portia secretly had in college and gave up for adoption.
It puts Fey (of 2008’s Baby Mama) onto the familiar ground of a woman facing the confusions of maternal instincts, and raises the ethical question of whether she can be corrupted by them.
But it’s not that clear: parenthood is a confused state in Admission. John himself is a single dad with an adopted Ugandan son, and Portia was raised by a single mom, Susannah (Lily Tomlin, loudly stealing scenes), a proto-feminist with a Bella Abzug tattoo on her shoulder who loves to tell the tale of how she met a man on a train 37 years ago, relieved him of his sperm, and never stuck around to catch his name. Susannah is a feisty loner who builds her own bicycles, makes her own sausages and grinds her own axe of antimale grievance. Admission is at its best when Fey can bounce her modern confusions off Tomlin’s assured air of dismissal.
Director Paul Weitz, who managed to balance melodrama with dry humour in About a Boy, has a harder time here. Fey turns Portia into a likable enough goofball, but she can’t find a way through to the legitimate feelings such a woman would have in discovering she has a son. When she bursts into a student party to see if Jeremiah has a toothbrush, for instance, it’s a sitcom moment of exaggerated, late-blooming motherliness rather than a real awakening of feeling.
Then there’s the matter of Rudd, an easygoing comic actor who has to call on all his easygoing comedy to make John into someone appealing. Rudd looks lost in the role, and it’s easy to see why: John is at once charming, intrusive, idealized and absent. He seems like no one as much as Paul Rudd in a checked shirt, and while we’re willing to buy that, it stops working when Admission begins to get all soft and fuzzy instead of madcap and ironic.
Admission is one of those films with a lousy trailer, because there are no key comic moments to showcase (the slapstick birth of a cow at John’s school never ignites into the gross-out laff riot it aims for.) Things go bad in a way that doesn’t quite add up to the conflict that you need for the necessary reconciliation. There are real problems of growing up and facing life, but the movie sloughs them off into Fey’s thinly covered desperation and Rudd’s shrug of charm. Admission doesn’t fail, but it drops out.