Liberal Arts

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Liberal Arts  (C-).  I went to a liberal-arts college, so I was prepared to like this new movie set in and around such an institution.  Alas, I really didn’t care for it.  Josh Radnor (TV’s How I Met Your Mother) stars as Jesse, a 35-year-old man-boy with an unfulfilling job as a college admissions officer in NYC.  He jumps at a chance to revisit his alma mater, an unnamed liberal-arts college in Ohio, for a beloved professor’s retirement party.  He meets and immediately develops a strong bond with a rather direct sophomore coed named Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen, Wind River).  But that’s not all; he also bonds with a mentally fragile kid named Dean (John Magaro, The Big Short), and with a holy fool named Nat (Zac Efron, 17 Again) who doesn’t even go to the school but apparently hangs out there all the time.  And he is struck dumb whenever he sees this iceberg of a professor who, like, totally changed his life with one class on the British Romantics.  So, there’s a lot going on in this movie, but little of it is convincing.  The dialogue is not great, and the plot has a going-through-the-motions kind of feel to it.  In sum, this is an eminently skippable movie.