By Amy Van Veen (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 27, 2013
For all those Liz Lemon fans who went into a nerd rage when the curtain was closed on 30 Rock, Tina Fey shows no signs of stepping away from the screen. She stars in this month’s Admission alongside the forever young Paul Rudd, the formidable Lily Tomlin and the bearded Michael Sheen.
Admission depicts the story of Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan who is approached by John Pressman (Rudd), a teacher at a developmental high school who invites her to speak at his school during her admissions tour of northeast schools. But, of course, there’s a twist. A twist she thinks she knows when she accidentally smushes her face against his—it was too awkward to be classified as a real kiss—but soon learns it’s less about him being interested in her and more him suggesting his favourite student is the son she gave up for adoption in college.
Most films that have these kinds of confrontations are for men who didn’t realize they had a child, not for women who made the decision to hide their pregnancy from their friends and family and give their child up in secret. The treatment of this situation—and everything else in the film—has a deep sense of realism. Most flicks of the rom-com persuasion suffer from a lack of reality. The audience can’t see themselves acting the same way as the characters on the screen and a suspension of disbelief is required to even begin to enjoy the film.
Admission, though, shows the unfolding of a series of events that compound upon Portia Nathan are – first she is confronted with the young man who could be her son, then she learns that her mother neglected to tell her she’d had a double mastectomy and her professor boyfriend of 10 years (Sheen) leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar pregnant with his twins. But in the midst of all this life change, Fey brings a strong relatability to the character.
While the film centers on Portia, it also looks at the larger complications that exist between parent and child. John (Rudd) is facing the tension between trying not to become his parents and trying to please his adopted son. Portia (Fey) is still struggling to find her footing under the shadow of her noted feminist mother while facing the reality of her own maternal role.
Apart from the plot itself and the emotional whirlwind I was subject to (in other words, it made me cry), Admission’s casting deserves attention. Mindy Kaling, in her book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, rages against the casting of rom-com characters – how actresses who are supposed to be the same age as the male lead are actually 10 years younger and how the mothers of the protagonists are the same age as their “sons.” Tina Fey and Paul Rudd are both 43-years-old. Lily Tomlin, who plays Fey’s unstoppable mother who expects her dogs to find their own food and takes a cab home from major surgery, is 73-years-old.
With a cast as solid as this, the return of doomed-to-fail relationship between Sheen and Fey and a story that wasn’t as predictable as one might think, this film left me more than satisfied – like when you eat steak and potatoes as opposed to a bowl of low-fat yogurt.
