Film Review: Admission

Duke just accepted the Class of 2017 in its most selective admissions process to date. But Admission dares to ask if we really let in (to both colleges and our hearts) the people who are most deserving. Because no one’s ever asked that before. Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, an uptight Princeton admissions officer. She’s obsessed with her work and boring to the core. She wears her hair in a bun. She’s had the same job for sixteen years. She drives a Jetta. John (Paul Rudd), Portia’s former classmate at Dartmouth, is the director of Quest, an alternative school. He’s a free spirit and do-gooder who never stays in one place for too long. It’s funny because they’re total opposites!

John contacts Portia about Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a genius student with horrible grades before being “rescued” by Quest. Upon meeting Jeremiah, Portia assures John he will never be admitted to Princeton. It’s then that John confesses that he thinks Jeremiah is the son Portia secretly gave up for adoption when she took a leave of absence from Dartmouth. Apparently she had a more gossipy roommate than she would have hoped.

Tina Fey is Tina Fey and Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd. You can’t really dislike either of them, but they don’t play off of each other well. Still, both are naturally funny enough in their solo scenes to salvage some semblance of humor.

As Portia’s off-the-grid mother, Lily Tomlin shines. Her interference is just as oppressive as the potential Princeton parents, but hers flows in the opposite direction. She tries, fairly unsuccessfully, to minimize Portia’s inherent fussiness. She eschews the typical mother-daughter relationship because she thinks it’s constructed. I think she would have done well at Brown.

What Admission does best is illustrate its titular topic. In applying to college, you’re told to “be yourself” or, at the very least to “be your best self,” innumerable times. While I’m sure the questions posed by parents and prospective students looking for the secret to getting in were intended to be hyperbolic, I’d heard them all before. The film “exposed” higher education’s attraction to a non-type type. Only students with unique interests and unusual talents can get in, as long as they also have national awards for those talents, perfect scores and perfect grades.

So, like any good tiger parent or status-obsessed high school counselor, John sets out to make Jeremiah break the mold but still fit inside the box. The only difference is he has a matter of months to do it rather than the typical eighteen years of strict preparation.

There are a decent number of unexpected twists and turns in which nearly all of the characters wade into murky ethical waters. Admission is a comedy of passions—the passion you need to get into an elite institution, passion that draws us together at inappropriate times and passion that makes us go a little crazy once in a while.

Admission fluctuates between a little too dark and not quite funny enough. It leaves us on the waiting list. We aren’t sure whether we should break down and cry or jump up and down with excitement. The story is propelled entirely by Fey’s character, but I’m not sure she’s unique or passionate enough to be accepted by audiences.