Liberal Arts
Any place you don't leave is a prison.
Ebert wrote:
Liberal Arts is an almost unreasonable pleasure about a jaded New Yorker who returns to his alma mater in Ohio and finds that his heart would like to stay there. It's the kind of film that appeals powerfully to me; to others, maybe not so much. There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth. There is a word to explain why this particular film so appealed to me. Reader, that word is 'escapism.' If you understand why I used the word 'reader' in just that way, you are possibly an ideal viewer for this movie.
I am predisposed, by Ebert’s definition of an ideal viewer (see my idolation for The Secret History), to like this film. The cast have only grown more striking in the decade since its release: pre-Marvel Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney, John Magaro, and Zac Efron. The Wikipedia article for this film all but promises it would be an instant favorite of mine, and I admit I blush a little to recall how much I once loved it (after all these years and all this time). I have no problem with early twenty-first century schmaltz: I’ll still defend Garden State, and I’ve always liked Josh Radnor as an actor. (What he did with How I Met Your Mother is, in my view, the only thing that kept that show together as it veered into the saccharine and the zany. His earnestness and affectations worked for me. It’s a rare skill to play a character who makes you want to both punch him in the face and give him a hug, and Radnor did it for nine seasons.)
Those niceties aside, we’re left with the film itself: half-baked, boring, and ill-advised, with little to cherish beyond Olsen’s solid performance. This is, transparently, a passion project for Radnor—shot at Kenyon, his alma mater, and populated with fellow alumni. Yet, for all that, the film never really conveys the beauty or serenity of a liberal arts campus, except in contrast to its depiction of a miserable thirty-something New Yorker who, for some reason, has a 1,500-square-foot apartment.
For a love letter to the small liberal arts campus, there is precious little lazing about on the quad in the screenplay (to be contrasted with, say, Everybody Wants Some!!!). You could summarize every act in a sentence or two, and most of the action takes place in houses or at house parties, with barely a whiff of the Kenyon atmosphere. The central relationship—between a 35-year-old and a college sophomore—feels impossible to take seriously, not just morally but on the level of basic plausibility. I’m 32 as I write this, three years younger than Radnor’s character, and while I have my own bouts of arrested development, I can’t for a second buy what the film is selling either at an earnest or ironic level.
So: the relationship at the film’s core rings hollow on the page and fares little better on screen. Without the charm of the campus or any real chemistry between the leads, we’re left with the film’s accessories:
- Allison Janney hamming it up, supposedly for pathos but really just having fun being a weirdo;
- Zac Efron in a proto-Neighbors role, an entertaining but weightless diversion;
- and, perhaps the one kernel of truth, Richard Jenkins as a professor forced into retirement after four decades, unsure which way to walk.
Jenkins gets one masterful scene, but that single moment of honesty can’t redeem the rest of the runtime, which—despite Olsen’s best efforts—is not just incoherent, but boring.