Admission

“Admission” is the story of Portia Nathan (Tina Fey), an admissions officer at Princeton University. She has held her job for sixteen years. She has never been married.

On an trip to an experimental high school called Quest, to explain Princeton’s admissions policies to the students, Portia meets a teacher, John Pressman; his twelve-year-old son Nelson; and a boy who wants to apply to Princeton, Jeremiah Balakian. John adopted Nelson when he lived in Uganda; Jeremiah is also an adopted child. Portia has never wanted children and doesn’t particularly like them, so it is with some resistance that she takes John’s news that Jeremiah is the baby she gave up for adoption eighteen years before. Then her maternal instincts arise; she pushes hard with the admissions committee to have Jeremiah accepted. He is a brilliant human being, a self-described autodidact, but his school record is abysmal and he is rejected. Portia sneaks into the office at night and substitutes the Accept label from the folder of a student who is opting for Yale, for the Deny label on Jeremiah’s folder. He is admitted, but she loses her job. Then she learns that Jeremiah is not the baby she gave away. She is not left with nothing; she and John are in love.

I went to the movie with the goal of remembering an emphasis in Reel Spirituality, that movies are made not only of words in a script but also of music (or sound) and image. The images in movies are primary. Movies are a visual medium. It’s probably more accurate to say that story is primary. Script, music and image serve the story, which is why the viewer goes to a movie in the first place. I noted that “Admission,” while the screen was still dark, begins with light, bouncy music; after this I was mostly unconscious of music and sound. The script answers the question, What would a woman do if she unexpectedly met the young person she gave away as a baby? There was nothing startling about the imagery. Script, imagery and casting made Jonathan and Nelson the most appealing characters, the only ones I cared about and wanted to know more about. It’s a light, bouncy movie.

In Reel Spirituality, Robert K. Johston presents a simple diagram to illustrate the many different kinds of movie. It consists of a horizontal line crossed by a vertical line. The extreme left represents entertainment, the extreme right education. The extreme top is realism; at the bottom is fantasy. “Admission” lands in the quadrant described by fantasy and entertainment. It’s not a realistic picture of university admissions practices nor, to my mind, of maternal instincts. It doesn’t attempt to lead the viewer into an unusual experience.

It was an odd coincidence that Paco and I went to a movie that included a matter of ethics just as I am starting to cogitate on theology and ethics at the movies. Too bad the ethics plot point in “Admission” wasn’t dramatized more interestingly as a dilemma.

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