Admission is a strange movie and difficult for me to evaluate.  Its major strength is the look it provides into the world of college recruitment, with dedicated admission counselors (such as Tina Fey, Gloria Reuben and Wallace Shawn) evaluating and sometimes investigating promising high school students attempting to get into the school in question, in this case Princeton.  I really like how Tina Fey’s character invites the essences of her prospects into her office as she reads about them and their achievements.  This personalization is very empathic and makes her a much more likable character.

Admission is ostensibly about the admission process and how one particular student from a New Age-type school attracts Fey’s personal attention — but that isn’t really what the movie is about at all.  Fey’s character is going through emotional turmoil, which isn’t helped when a teacher (Paul Rudd) at the New Age school introduces her to the student, along with a bombshell reason why she should help him get into the vaunted halls of Princeton.  Then Paul Weitz’s film becomes a weird hybrid of drama, romance and character study as Fey’s character evolves into someone who would never dream of doing what she eventually does.

The film doesn’t judge Fey’s eventual actions, but I sort of felt that it should.  When she breaks the rules, for reasons that turn out to be completely false, she seems to feel no remorse.  The movie then forces a kind of happy ending onto its situation, but it didn’t feel genuine or even desirable.  She seems pretty happy at the conclusion, whereas my reaction was that she should be so bothered by guilt that she should run away and start her life over somewhere else.  Maybe this worked better as a book, but this story seems misguided and morally bankrupt.  Its actors are appealing and it is occasionally humorous (but never funny), but I cannot recommend it because it doesn’t have any real integrity.  ☆ 1/2.  28 March 2013.