Review: You Probably Won't Like Admission, But Your Mom Might

OK, maybe that's a bit unfair. Not all moms will like this movie. And some people who aren't moms will. However, my point stands: Admission fits the stereotype to the "Mom date movie" to a T.

It's a good, solid movie with some funny bits and some dramatic bits. The word I keep coming back to thinking of Admission is "tepid." It's meh. It's milquetoast. It's your mom's ideal date movie if your mom likes movies she doesn't have to think about. And also if your mom has bad taste.



The premise of the movie is this: Tina Fey plays Portia, a Princeton admissions officer. She's a middle-aged woman whose life is in a rut: Professionally, romantically, socially. More or less in every way that matters.

Paul Rudd plays Generic Paul Rudd Character, a charming school director whose life is also screwed up, even if he doesn't know it. GPRC thinks he's found Portia's long-lost son, whom she gave up for adoption, and he wants Portia to get said son, named Jeremiah, into Princeton. Even though, for all Jeremiah keeps saying he wants to go to Princeton and the movie keeps saying he's the ~ideal student~ because he ~values knowledge for its own sake~, you never get the impression that his life would be all that much worse if he had to default to a B school.

That's my major problem with the movie: I don't feel the stakes. All the characters are so blah, with blah lives and blah problems, that I never really cared what happened to them. The trailer makes it look like a comedy, but it's really not all that funny, which should be a crime when Tina Fey and Paul Rudd are there. Both of them gave phoned-in performances, though they didn't have that much to work with, comedy-wise.

The screening I attended was followed by a Q&A with the screenwriter, who said that the script originally had more comedy, but director Paul Weitz decided to make it more dramatic. Shame, since the dramatic elements didn't work either. For Portia, the main conflicts were her issues with motherhood and life-career balance. And it all felt so generic. Even though it's not! Even though movies about middle-aged women that put their issues center-stage are incredibly rare! Much of Portia's time is spent angsting over a job that she clearly doesn't like and isn't good for her. So why do I care if she quits/is fired/whatever? Let it happen and the move on to something interesting!

 For GPRC, the conflict springs from a communication issue involving his young son Nelson: GPRC wants to travel around the world, never staying in one place for long. He thinks Nelson wants that, too. Nelson does not. It's something that could be resolved in five minutes, and yet it's stretched over a whole movie. Likewise with Portia's angsting over her job: The whole thing is über-contrived. You can tell she doesn't like her job and that it's not good for her. So I was 0% invested in whether she ended up fired/quitting/whatever.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here. There were some good bits: Lily Tomlin as Portia's mother was great, and Michael Sheen (as Portia's ex) was a welcome presence even though he didn't get to do much. And, for all that I don't like this movie, I'm really not its target audience. The middle-aged ladies in my screening seemed to love it for the most part. Me? I wish they'd picked either comedy or drama and leaned harder on it. The resulting movie might still have been bad, but it might've at least been interesting, too.

Categories: Admission, Paul Rudd, Paul Weitz, reviews, Tina Fey