Liberal Arts

You’d think that I would be the target market for a film about a thirtysomething English major (with a history minor) who attended one of the great liberal arts colleges in the Midwest and wound up working a completely uninteresting and uninspiring job that he unequivocally hates, given that I am a thirtysomething English major (with a history minor) who attended one of the great liberal arts colleges—er, universities—in the Midwest and wound up working a completely uninteresting and uninspiring job that I unequivocally hate. To an extent, this is true—I wanted very much to like the film.

The problem is that much of the film fails to ring true. Jesse Fisher (Josh Radnor, as writer/director/star) apparently yearns to still be in college, but what’s not clear is why he suffers this yearning. He missed an opportunity of some sort—no one starts out in life aspiring to be an admissions counselor at a community college, or to hand out passes to dimbulbs who could not be bothered to learn that the film was subtitled before they arrived at the theatre—but no voice is given this missed opportunity. He declares early on that he was an English major. What do English majors do? They write or they teach. A lot of the time, they teach in order to be able to write.

Jesse Fisher seems not to have been inclined to do either, and so one wonders what prompted him to pursue a degree in English in the first place; and if he realized while he was in college that what he really wanted was to remain in college indefinitely, one then wonders how it escaped his knowledge that remaining in college, especially for an English major, is not especially hard to accomplish. If you are successful in the discipline, and it is implied that Jesse was, then you go on to get your MFA and then, presumably, assume an assistant professorship somewhere in the wide world.

Unless you really just want to remain an undergraduate forever. Jesse’s singing-in-the-rain stroll through campus, when he returns at the behest of a retiring professor with whom he forged a close friendship during his days as a student, clearly indicates that being on campus animates him in ways that wearing a tie to work and asking people why they want to go to college does not. On the one hand, I totally get where he’s coming from. I loved being in college, even if I did not avail myself of all of the academic opportunities available to me as well as I ought to have done; but college is a means to an end, not the end itself. You go into it know that you’re only passing through.

This is my second go at writing about this film, and I find myself coming up against the same wall this time as I did the first time. I understand that the entire thrust of the film is that Jesse simply stopped growing at some point between matriculation and graduation. I don’t even find it hard to believe that this could happen to a person—not everyone is meant to go to college, even if they think they’re supposed to. He is, by his own admission, stunted; but it’s difficult to square that stuntedness with someone who did well in one of the finest undergraduate English programs in the country. Maybe he really had no idea what he wanted to do and just happened to do well enough in English at Kenyon to graduate and make a start in the real world.

Radnor means for the character to come across as unmoored, but setting the story at such a prestigious institution strains the character’s credibility. I have read that the story is somewhat autobiographical, but Radnor, also a product of Kenyon College (with a degree in Theatre rather than English), was a star on television by 30. Jesse is still drifting at 35. I can appreciate Radnor’s effort to pay homage to his alma mater, but I can’t help but think that the story might have come across as more authentic if it had taken place somewhere slightly more pedestrian.

And all of that might have been forgivable if not for Jesse’s literary pretensions. A centerpiece of the film is a lengthy back-and-forth between Jesse and Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), the 19-year-old Summer of Love throwback who manages to woo Jesse with her free spirit and joie de vivre. He notices a book on a shelf in her dorm room and proceeds to interrogate her about why someone of such seeming quality could possibly possess such a worthless tome. (It’s never explicitly stated, but the book in question is meant to be one from the Twilight series.) While not defending the quality of the book, Zibby unabashedly says that the book makes her happy. It may not be very good, but she likes it. Jesse cannot reconcile liking a book that isn’t also a good book (although in his mind he’s probably thinking that people should only like Great Books).

I would certainly have reacted differently to this section of the film if I had not read the first Twilight novel. I might well have agreed with Jesse’s pointed invective, but the point of the too-long sequence is that you really shouldn’t complain about something when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Zibby presents this idea succinctly, and Jesse pretty much rejects it out of hand; but in deference to his new friend, he agrees to read it. He still rails against the novel after reading it, though—mostly because he has already decided that it is worthless. The Twilight novels aren’t for everyone, of course—what books are?—but Jesse’s denigration of them is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than an objective evaluation. The most useful thing it contributes to the film is to more fully paint the character of Jesse Fisher as a cross between an unkempt, vaguely professorial Ted Mosby, and the Jesse Eisenberg character in The Squid and the Whale. I’ve known literature snobs like that—and I kept waiting for Jesse to launch into a tirade about how Zibby just had to read Proust, because he would break her heart and change her life.

I’m giving short shrift to most of the plot (and sub-plots, most of which are somewhere between unconvincing and ridiculous, and not even within shouting distance of satisfying) and all of the other characters; but apart from Richard Jenkins, who quite zestfully plays the retiring professor who provides the impetus for this moveable feast, the remaining cast are all portraying caricatures rather than characters—and they even seem to know it. I get the feeling that Radnor really wanted to write a love letter to college, but I wonder if he hasn’t been away so long that he no longer connects with the part of himself that could synthesize all those things that happened in college and make them seem more important than they really were.