Admission

A film starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd sets us up to expect belly-laughs. But in Paul Weitz’s Admission we we get more wit than guffaws -- and more wisdom than both. It's very brave to cast these comic stars in such a cerebral but touching -- and still funny -- film
     The title works three ways. The plot deals with the routine work of the Princeton University admissions office, where a stringent system admits the few successes from a horde of applicants. Thematically, the three central characters grow out of the rigid exclusivity in their personal (i.e., love) lives and admit someone into a new intimacy. Third, that admission recognizes, confesses and addresses their vulnerability. 

Admissions officer Portia (Tina Fey) thinks she’s happy in her efficient live-in relationship with English prof Mark (Michael Sheen). But in bed he reads Chaucer to her. As they host his department party he announces he is leaving her for a famous Virginia Woolf specialist, who’s carrying his twins (you know, A Womb of Her Own?).  Portia has to overcome both her professional and romantic commitments to admit John Pressman (Paul Rudd). She's so used to excluding, rejecting, people that at one point her cheek is branded with the word "Deny."

She also has to overcome the cold feminist ardor of her mother, Susannah (Lily Tomlin), whose aversion to men allowed only the one-night stand that conceived Portia.   Susannah embodies female independence, from the Bella Abzug tattoo on her bicep, to building her own bike, to the First Wave poster that declares a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. When she’s seduced by Russian professor Polokov (Olek Krupa), however, she’s converted from kale eater to grinding out and fondling her own phallic sausage.

Even the apparently most liberated character, John Pressman, the director of an experimental high school, has to learn to make further admissions. He fled his wealthy, starched family for the vagabond life of the international do-gooder. But his roving is as compulsive, inhibiting and isolating as Portia’s self-denying 15 years in the Princeton office. He comes to admit the greater needs and desires of his adopted son Nelson (Travaris Spears).That cancels John’s trip to Ecuador and promises a relationship with Portia.

Portia’s second admission is to acknowledge that she had a son that she gave up for adoption, who might be the offbeat prodigy Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) she now finagles into admission to Princeton. Jeremiah’s candidacy breaks down both her personal and her professional strictures. Admitting him into her life costs her her job. Even when she loses Jeremiah she retains the prospect of some time meeting her lost son. But her key growth here is in admitting she had a son and that she yearns to meet him. She faces a truth and possible relationship that she had long denied. 

The film is as funny as it is poignant. The humour is sly and observational. In her fastidiousness Portia snips her bonzai tree down to nothing, then fixates on the social worker’s tree at her own interview later. The Tomlin and Wally Shawn characters and Pressman’s mother are fully fleshed out in incidental details and ironies. The hilarity is a matter of wit, not guffaw, but it’s there and it serves the wisdom in Portia's name and in Jeremiah's monologue of the various mythic goddesses of wisdom..

Indeed, this obviously liberal film still questions a variety of liberal assumptions, such as by the letter feminism, the complacency of do-gooders both in the experimental school and in the international arena, the restrictive liberties in open relationships, and especially parent-child issues. Every child and every parent in this film is working out a problem between them.