National Post (National Edition)
ADMIT ONE
Tina Fey’s campus comedy Admission gets the details right.
FROM 30 ROCK TO A SOLID ROM-COM
In this new romantic comedy from Paul Weitz ( About a Boy, Little
Fockers), Tina Fey plays an uptight, standoffish career woman with second thoughts about missing out on motherhood. And Paul Rudd plays a laid-back, congenial guy whose wardrobe is mostly flannel and jeans. How did these two not meet up before?
The comedy may be as predictable as a Windsor-to-Woodstock road trip with a GPS, but the comic gold is to be found in little nuggets. Someone cared enough about this movie to get the details right.
So, yes, Fey is an admissions officer at Princeton, even though she works behind a door that says NO ADMITTANCE, and carries a supply of hotel-style DO NOT DISTURB signs with her. Rudd runs New Quest, an off-the-grid school that specializes in third-world development projects.
But check out the supporting cast. Wallace Shawn is Fey’s boss, tut-tutting his way through every scene, and coming perilously close to a Princess Bride-
style “inconceivable!” at one juncture. Lily Tomlin plays her militant mom; note that her house has a framed print of a fish riding a bicycle, and that she is the author of a book called The Masculine Myth.
Michael Sheen makes hay with his role as Fey’s simpering live-in boyfriend, who dumps her for a “vile Virginia Woolf scholar” (Sonya Walger) in an early scene. This because the best emotional place to be in a rom-com is on the rebound.
The biggest question mark in the cast is Nat Wolff, star of Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band. He plays Jeremiah, a young prodigy whom Rudd would desperately like to see placed at Princeton. Why he is so obsessed is something of a mystery; after all, he has a young son of his own (Travaris Spears), whom he alternately coos over and neglects.
He’s also figured out that Jeremiah is the child Fey’s character gave up for adoption years before. Again, why this is so important to him is never quite explained. It may be that he’s only happy when engaged in a project to help someone else, preferably someone as downtrodden and disadvantaged as possible.
Fortunately, Wolff nails the part as a socially awkward learning machine, referred to about a million times in the film as an autodidact. (Princeton-speak for “self-taught.”) When he says he has a robotics class to attend, it’s ticklingly unclear whether he means to study how to build one, or how to be one.
Admission was adapted by Karen Croner ( One True Thing) from a 2009 novel, and at times it flirts with being a Christopher Guest type of mockumentary about the lengths to which students (and their parents) will go to make the Ivy League cut. The rest of the time it flirts with implausibility, as in a scene where Fey helps Rudd deliver a baby cow, and then has a shower with him, separated by a shoulderhigh partition.
There’s so much to like about Admission that these easy outs are more annoying than they would be in a more mediocre film. Fortunately, Weitz and his immensely likeable stars manage to rise above such moments more often than not. The movie might not be Princeton material, but I wouldn’t criticize anyone contributing to its scholarship. Ω∫◊