As
directed by actor Josh Radner (TV’s How I
Met Your Mother), Liberal Arts
plays out the common fantasy of returning to university ten years older and
wiser. Radnor’s Jesse is a 35-year-old New Yorker invited back to his Ohio alma
mater to attend the retirement festivities of his erstwhile mentor (Richard
Jenkins); in one of those plot contrivances baked up in the Sundance Lab, he’s
all too ready for a change of scenery, having just split up with his
girlfriend. On his first afternoon on campus, Jesse runs into peach-ripe
19-year-old Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), who naturally has a thing for older guys,
and introduces our boy to the wonders of classical music (“Beethoven: whoa”) as
he wonders what, exactly, to do with her.
“Why
do I like this guy so much?,” Zac Efron wonders of Jesse, in his
good-for-the-poster bit-part as another of this campus’s resident kooks.
“Because he’s… likable,” is Zibby’s response. Like August’s Take This Waltz, Liberal Arts establishes itself very quickly as one of those nice
indies – let’s call them nindies – in which terribly likable characters do
everything they can not to have to say no, thus deferring any conflict. To
anyone raised on an American indie sector that actively sought out real-world
hardships to address – as opposed to what Zibby defines as the general
“suckiness” of the post-grad world – Liberal
Arts will feel dramatically thin: a film notionally set in the higher
education sphere of 2012 surely ought to at least pay lip service to
departmental cutbacks and reduced job prospects.
Scraps
of interest pop up along the way, however. In what amount to recurring cameos,
those wily veterans Jenkins and Allison Janney (as an embittered English
lecturer) conspire to do something unexpectedly flinty with the tofu crumbs
Radner’s script leaves them with. There’s also a degree of pleasure to be taken
from watching Olsen, this year’s female breakthrough star, trying to give this
fantasy some grounding and spontaneity – though after the extreme experience of
Martha Marcy May Marlene, she
convinces as a 19-year-old only as much as the kids on Glee now do as high-schoolers, and not at all as a sexual naïf.
It’s
just that, in his feature debut, Radner struggles to suggest much of a
personality – either before or behind the camera – beyond that of a bearded
sitcom softie. A couple of ruminative, even truthful scenes late on raise its
grade, but overall Liberal Arts plays
like an extended version of the kind of middle-of-the-road sofa-fest you might
relax into on E4 any other weeknight. Compare it to Peep Show’s second-series back-to-Dartmouth episode, an altogether
sharper and funnier rendering of the exact same scenario, and its shortcomings
as both comedy and drama become rather too apparent.
Liberal Arts opens in selected cinemas from today.
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