You’ve raised the perfect child and that perfect child is applying to Princeton. Portia (Tina Fey) is an admissions officer and she advises the would-be hopeful students of the class of 2016 to “Just be yourself.” But she’s not taking her own advice, fighting inner conflict and exterior ones including her unavailable mother (Lily Tomlin) whose a feminist from the 60s and “got pregnant by a stranger on a train.”
Between her own ‘stuff’ Fey comes to terms with sifting thru applicants whose “Father was Cuban. In a wheelchair” or “speaks five languages.” It’s about passion. And Fey finds it when she visits John Pressman (Paul Rudd) at an alternative school of spirited debate, called New
Quest, where they deliver baby cows and save the planet, rather than sit on the crew team. One of the students, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) is a prodigy with a sorted past, including the fact he might be Portia’s son….the one she gave up for adoption back when she was in college.
Fey and Rudd become what will be predictable love interests but it doesn’t work. He’s all loosey-goosey and she’s a bitch – sort of that
self-righteous single working woman who has an answer for everything but never changed a diaper. The one thing you take away as the audience is that the college admissions process today is about your child, not about you and your achievements, so just let go and let God.
The films brilliance is probably due in part to the director, Paul Weitz, whose Hugh Grant hit About A Boy was equally complicated. There’s
a lot of Erica Jong and Gloria Steinhem reference points in this movie and while the film is one of those rare gems of brilliant romantic comedy, somehow the film, like its applicants deserved to be denied rather then accepted. ♚ ♛ 1/2