Based on the same-named novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, “Admission” was written by Karen Croner and directed by Paul Weitz, and for the latter, it must be tough knowing that you haven’t done anything in a decade that lives up to 2002’s “About a Boy.” Really, the stuff Weitz has done since then—even the very enjoyable “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant,” but especially the frustratingly awful “Little Fockers”—just can’t live up to the pairing of Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult (who is all grown up in this spring’s “Warm Bodies” and “Jack the Giant Slayer”).
And it’s unfortunate that “Admission” has to join the “surprisingly bad” portion of Weitz’s resume, since it seems to have all the right elements: Fey (of “Megamind” and “Date Night”) foraying into drama; costar Paul Rudd (of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Wanderlust,” “Our Idiot Brother,” and “Monsters vs. Aliens”) doing his charming, handsome thing; and a look into the absurdly stressful, highly competitive world of college admissions. But one by one, elements of “Admission” crumble. Fey is a hilarious, quirky person, but her personality doesn’t work well in this role, which is far too neurotic and ridiculous to mesh with her skillset. Rudd is, of course, wonderfully likeable and affable, but his character is nothing more than your rom-com trope of great guy doing great things; the film even pokes at that, but doesn’t add anything to his role to flesh him out. And that look into the admissions process—it’s nothing insightful. There is, as Fey’s character keeps insisting to hopeful college students, nothing secretive to share.
Fey stars as Princeton University admissions counselor Portia Nathan, who has been with the school for 16 years; with the announced resignation of her boss, Portia has her eyes on his old job—but is challenged for the position by coworker Corinne (Gloria Reuben, of “Lincoln”), who is happily married, has kids, and takes her job extremely seriously. It’s not that Portia isn’t passionate about her job—in fact, she imagines each applicant as she reads their documents in her office, practically having conversations or arguments with them—but without a husband and without children, her female coworkers find her pathetic and pitiable. If she can’t even pick winners in her personal life, they figure, how can she pick students that will succeed at Princeton?
Set against that professional drama are, well, numerous other dramas. There’s Portia’s contentious relationship with her feminist mother, Susannah (Lily Tomlin), a women’s studies scholar who raised Portia alone and won’t buy food for her dogs because she expects them to go out and hunt. (She’s as tough a lady as you would expect.) There’s Portia’s unfulfilled relationship with her boyfriend of 10 years, Mark (Michael Sheen, of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1” and “Part 2,” “Midnight in Paris,” “TRON: Legacy,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”), who is chair of the English department and pats Portia on the head, as if she were an obedient dog, instead of kissing her.
And finally, there’s Portia’s burgeoning connection with John Pressman (Rudd), a fellow Dartmouth graduate who begs her to come visit his alternative high school to recruit one specific student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff, of “Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding”). The kid is quirky but cute, a probable prodigy but with terrible grades. And, John says, he’s pretty sure that Jeremiah is Portia’s son, a child she secretly gave up for adoption back in college.
It’s one heck of a curveball to throw at someone—guess what, here’s your kid, years later!—but “Admission” becomes unpleasantly unbelievable the longer the film uses that plot as a way to bring Portia and John together. Because the characters have nothing else in common besides this shared info, all their interactions revolve around Jeremiah, meaning there’s very little time to explore them for who they are either separately or together. Why did Portia become an admissions counselor? Why Princeton? Why would she stay with Mark for 10 years? The film lazily uses characters to continuously describe Portia as “boring,” but that’s such a sparse, meaningless characterization. Portia has moments of wit and sarcasm and genuineness thanks to Fey’s performance, but that doesn’t crystallize into anything specific.
The same goes for John and Jeremiah, who exist in Portia’s orbit but don’t really have their own parts to play. Because the film can’t really put Portia and Jeremiah together without giving too much away, he’s left out for the most part—so why should we care if he ends up being Portia’s son? And the same goes for John, who hastily gets a “poor rich boy” backstory but very little else.
It’s a shame that the characters are so thin and the plotting so typically rom-com because “Admission” has the potential to deal with a lot of engaging issues—the emotional stages of motherhood, the dynamic between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons, the value of a prestigious education (although most of the Princeton characters are fairly awful, there is an overall privileging of learning happening in the film), the idea of nature versus nurture, whether you can ever really outgrow your family. All of those ideas are there, simmering beneath the surface. But for the most part, “Admission” cheats us of that experience—taking the easy way out instead of producing any original work of its own.
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