Jesse (Josh Radnor) is 35 and works in university admissions in New York City. He is in a funk and detached from his life.
When his favourite university professor (Richard Jenkins) invites him to speak at his retirement ceremony, he leaps at the chance to escape his current inertia.
Being back in the familiar surroundings of the university campus, Jesse is reminded of what life used to be like.
When a 19-year-old student, Zibby (Elisabeth Olsen), takes an interest in him, Jesse sees an opportunity to recaptures some of his lost youth.
Liberal Arts is not the worst movie I have ever seen, but it has an impression of what it thinks it is that exceeds itself.
I caught this at the film festival in 2012.
I remember kind of liking it, but it had not stuck in the brain until I happened on it while trawling though the internet.
It was a weird experience because I hooked into one aspect of it, while being repulsed with other parts of it.
I enjoyed the Ohio locations, and I did connect with some of the main character's recollections of how much he enjoyed his time there.
But then there is the rest of the movie.
Repulsed might be a strong word but there is something so smug about this movie that really put me off.
My big problem with the movie is how unoriginal and forced the whole enterprise is. I could not stop feeling like I was watching something that had been written. Every character's journey felt so predictable, and their dialogue was heavy with such obvious meaning that I started to get annoyed at the movie's sense of its own significance.
Even the movie's attempt at humour come off as hack: Zac Efron plays a magical bro who offers Jesse advice - he is not particularly funny, but the movie seems to think he is hilarious, probably because the role is played by Zac Efron. With the distance of almost a decade, and the trajectory of Efron's career, that joke has worn very thin.
When our lovebirds start exchanging handwritten letters, I started staring past the screen into the distance. Their conversations are so superficial - there is a certain pretension to discussing life through opera, but their writing voices take it over into pseudo-intellectual BS.
Jesse writes like a bad harlequin novel, and Zibby’s dissections of opera read like someone pulled quotes from Wikipedia.
There is a scene where our hero picks up a vampire novel Zibby has been reading and mocks her for it, and asks her what is it about. To have this character played by the writer-director criticise another work for lacking subtext seems rich.
To take the main characters’ line: what is this movie about?
Nothing. The character ends up learning the lesson you know he will, and he ends up with the nice lady his own age (Elizabeth Reaser) who shares his love of books (she works at a book store!).
In the lead role, Josh Radnor is fine. It does feel like he is playing an older, more jaded Ted Moseby, but I feel like Ted had more pathos and humour than Jesse. I put it down to the script which never finds a way to flesh him out and make him feel like a real person - he always comes across as 'guy in his thirties learns how to be cool with being in his thirties'.
Elisabeth Olsen is a great actress, but watching her in this it felt like she was trapped by the script's limited conception of her character. Olsen brings warmth and maturity to the role, but Zibby never feels real - she always feels like a reaction to the main character, rather than a unique personality.
That is the problem with the movie: Zibby is an idea of youth, just like Jesse’s professor (Richard Jenkins) is a personification of his own fears of ageing and irrelevance. Everyone is an idea not a person.
And in a movie that wants to be all about character, that is a big problem.
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment