Romance doesn’t make grade
Fresh off now-wrapped 30 Rock, Tina Fey teams with This is 40’ s puckish Paul Ruddfor Admission, a romantic comedy that doesn’t live up to its serious ambitions to reach outside the genre for some deeper meaning beyond screwball antics and kissy-kissy.
Following up big-screen comic turns in Baby Mamaand Date Night, Fey stars in the story of tightly wound Princeton admissions officer Portia whose rigidity and quest for transparency is suddenly muddled by a body slam to her ethics.
The comic rewards are there in the early going for those missing Liz Lemon. But when Admission stumbles, which it does often, aiming low for easy laughs at the price of missed opportunities to go deeper, the picture lays there uninspired, like a slice of boiled ham.
Worse, perhaps because she’s our funny-smart SNL wonder woman, Fey falters in her romantic scenes with Rudd, where the screenwriter Karen Croner can’t resist having her lob zingers when she’s supposed to be concentrating on locking lips. It’s as awkward as watching a Tyrannosaurus rex learn to bowl.
No such problems arise with Lily Tomlin, whose low-key, acerbic delivery as Portia’s radical-feminist mom Susannah is the movie’s highlight.
Admission
K (out of 4) Starring Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Nat Wolff and Lily Tomlin. Directed by Paul Weitz. 107 minutes. Opens March 22 at major theatres. PG
Haphazard directing from Paul Weitz, who went from About a Boy to bottom-trolling for cheap yuks with Little Fockers in less than a decade, has to take a good chunk of the blame for Admission’s poorly connected, vignette-like setups. A little more depth and less predictability — witness fussy Portia gradually pruning her desktop bonsai to death to show us she has maternaldeficit issues — would have helped. The story is based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2009 novel about those who channel academic hopefuls willing to do anything to gain entrance to those ivy-covered walls through the soul-killing chutes of Princeton’s admissions office. Judge not, as the saying goes. There’s some cutthroat competition going on behind those shuttered office doors, too. Admissions dean Clarence ( The Princess Bride’s Wallace Shawn) is about to retire, launching a cage match for his desk. Portia and her chief rival Corinne (Toronto’s Gloria Reuben) square off. They ruthlessly comb the country to discover the best and brightest grist for the Princeton mill. Portia doesn’t get much encouragement at home from her professor-boyfriend Mark (pompously self-absorbed Michael Sheen), who pats her head at the end of the day and otherwise ignores her. Looking to mine some intellectual gold, Portia follows up on an invitation from a former college classmate John Pressman (Rudd) to check out the (very) alternative New Quest school. It’s a quirky place where milking cows and creating sustainable water systems are as valued as solving math problems. Portia barely remembers John, but he has no such memory lapses. Remarkably, he even recalls the day and time Portia gave up her son in a hush-hush adoption after a college pregnancy — information he’s used to deduce his star pupil, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff playing pleasingly nerdy) must be Portia’s kid. Social misfit Jeremiah is the oddest duck in the pond, given to awkward vocal ramblings and free associations. But his weirdness can’t hide the shining beacon of his intellect or his open-hearted sweetness. He’d like to go to Princeton but his marks light a path to reme- dial classes at a hillbilly college. Can a woman who would rather eat nails than bend rules muzzle her inner cop enough to help slide her son past the gatekeepers of the toughest school admissions process in the country?
Pulled back from comedy into dramatic territory, what Portia does with this newfound information forms the moral dilemma at the heart of Admission. It also provides some of its best onscreen moments as she tries to deal with the demands of her job vs. her own moral code, her newfound role of mother and her dealings with Susannah — who steadfastly refuses to name the man who fathered Portia during a chance encounter.
Susannah may be a minor character but her presence in Admission is so terrific she deserves her own movie. Or perhaps a talk show. Or even a lecturing slot at Princeton: how to steal a movie.