Though smarter than your average dramedy, Paul Weitz’s forced Admission faces some major identity issues. Tina Fey plays a discombobulated Princeton admissions officer who must confront the limits of her morals when she learns that a potential Princeton applicant might be the son she gave up for adoption. What appears on paper to be an ideal three-dimensional, morally complex role for the quick-witted comedienne backfires in practice, relying on Fey to be funny in a movie that works better serious. Despite offering consolation to the world’s many Ivy League rejects that the gatekeepers sometimes make mistakes, low entrance levels await.

Clearly, what Weitz wanted was to recapture some of Fey’s Baby Mama mojo (it earned a surprise $60 million, after all), relying on the actress to bring the same vulnerable uncertainty to another harried working-woman role. But that film was conceived as a traditional laffer, whereas Admission is based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s more nuanced novel, in which Fey’s seemingly straightlaced character is thrown for a loop by a highly unusual applicant.

While the book treats this wrinkle as its big surprise, the more plot-driven adaptation serves it up as a central concept, positioning Fey’s Portia Nathan as an increasingly screwball character struggling (and mostly failing) to maintain her professional ethics amid a messy personal crisis. Through a series of clunky, on-the-nose character-development scenes, the pic establishes Portia’s life — or, more accurately, her current state of denial: She’s fallen into a predictable routine with her tweedy lit-professor b.f. (Michael Sheen), her fastidiously clean workspace and her general intolerance of kids.

Instead of indulging auds’ natural curiosity with a look inside the closed-door world of college admissions, the pic leaves Fey and her co-stars to play dress-up in a wood-paneled office where Full Story »