Blu Review: Admission (2013)

Cast: Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Nat Wolff
Director: Paul Weitz
Country: USA
Genre: Comedy
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: Admission will be released on Blu-ray and DVD Tuesday July 9th.

Admission (Weitz, 2013) centers on Portia Nathan (Tina Fey), an admissions officer for Princeton, whose life goes into upheaval when she is contacted by John Pressman (Paul Rudd) who runs a new alternative high school in rural New Jersey. During her high school visits, she meets with him and a student he wants her to closely consider for Princeton. Her live-in boyfriend, Mark (Michael Sheen) a Literature professor at Princeton, leaves her for a universally hated Virginia Wolfe scholar who is pregnant with his twins. Of course, she becomes romantically involved with John when he drops a bombshell on her. He knows that she had a child while in college (they went to the same school at the same time and he happened to know her roommate) and she gave the son up for adoption. He thinks her son is Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), the kid he wants to get into Princeton. Well, this complicates her already complicated life and she loses focus at work, and so on.

Weitz has a way of creating good characters in okay situations but his films normally wind up being a tad overlong with the good moments peppered throughout and seldom sustained.

The film is directed by Paul Weitz, who previously directed American Pie (1999), About a Boy (2002), In Good Company (2004) and several other less than noteworthy films. Weitz has a way of creating good characters in okay situations but his films normally wind up being a tad overlong with the good moments peppered throughout and seldom sustained. This creates frequent lulls in his films and Admission is no acceptation. There are many good moments in the film, but they are spaced out over the course and what fills in the gaps between them are dead spots. A lot of the action included is unnecessary or repetitive, including a running gag that whenever Portia is upset about something, Mark shows up and thinks she’s upset about him leaving her and will not listen to her for an explanation. Then his horrible girlfriend-turned fiancé-turned wife shows up and literally pulls him away from her and he goes. It was funny the first time, then it became wearisome.

That’s not to say the film is directed poorly, it’s not. The trouble is that it is directed functionally. There is a lot of emphasis placed on Tina Fey’s ability to create humor out of an extremely awkward situation and that talent is not enough to carry an entire feature by herself. The supporting cast is good or, in the case of Lily Tomlin as Portia’s mother Susannah, great and it was a pleasure to see Wallace Shawn as her boss. When Fey is interacting with the other characters, the scenes move quickly and are often funny. The humor of the film is not intended to be laugh out loud, but kind of chuckle slightly to yourself and those scenes accomplish that.

The trouble lies in Tina Fey, whom I like a great deal, but here as the sole star with no other actor to play off of for many scenes she just can’t carry the picture. It felt as if she was trying to transplant Liz Lemon into this world and without colorful people for her to interact with, as is the case for a hefty portion of the film, the humor falls flat. She’s done well in other features simply because she’s been paired with other actors as co-stars or she was a supporting actress and exposure to her was limited. I think that her humor works best in short bursts, not long term.

The trouble lies in Tina Fey, whom I like a great deal, but here as the sole star with no other actor to play off of for many scenes she just can’t carry the picture.

The trouble also falls to the script. Tina Fey is primarily a writer and a good one at that. Here, she had nothing to do with the credited screenplay and that likely plays into the film’s shortcomings. It was based on a novel, but there was no sense that the screenwriter (Karen Corner) was just trying to hit key scenes in the book and get them on screen like the way The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) felt to me. I think the best writer for Tina Fey is Tina Fey and when she is put in a vehicle written for her it comes out with mixed results. She tries hard and is good in the film, she just isn’t captivating and she does not make us care deeply for her character. That could be a fault of the script for not providing a more fleshed-out character, or it could be Fey’s fault for not developing Portia beyond the surface level jokes and sadness.

The film tries very hard to balance sadness and laughter, and that ends up making the film uneven in tone. The balance is off and Portia isn’t deep enough to make the sadness fully believable. In fact, the only three-dimensional characters are Susannah, Jeremiah and Nelson (John’s adopted son played by Travaris Spears) and they are only on screen for about 25 minutes total between the three of them. It’s the lack of subtlety and depth that undermines the film. The stretches that are supposed to portray Portia’s sadness or her wish for something more in her life end up making the film feel long and drawn out. If Portia was able to come across as anything but awkward and somewhat bumbling, those scenes would work well, but she just isn’t.

There is a good movie buried in the finished product of Admission. Perhaps with a different director, that film would have emerged. Unfortunately as it stands we have a passable film that has moments of entertainment, moments of boredom, and some brief moments of near greatness but no cohesion and a character arc in Portia whose beginning and end are so close together, we feel that she is in almost the same place as when we found her. Admission has its moments, but they are few and far between.

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Doug Heller

Sr. Staff Film Critic

I believe film occupies a rare place as art, entertainment, historical records and pure joy. I love all films, good and bad, from every time period with an affinity to Classical Hollywood in general, but samurai, sci-fi and noir specifically. My BA is in Film Studies from Pitt and my MA is in Education. My goal is to be able to ignite a love of film in others that is similar to my own.

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