Whatever
the institution,
college is, as anyone who’s matriculated will attest,
almost always as much about the social experience as the educational
value. It’s the intermediate weigh station between the silly, insular,
sewing-circle politics of high school and the crushing, rat-race
actuality of real life, and
who hasn’t entertained a prolongation of
that experience? Moreover, what if there were no institutional controls
in place, and you could while away your time with classes that
consisted of skateboarding, daydreaming, rock ’n’ roll posing,
“Wingman-ing 101” and girl-watching?
The anarchic college comedy Accepted
— a mash-up of any number of ’80s adolescent broadsides, with a healthy
pinch of Ferris Bueller’s dreamer’s disease thrown in — takes this
notion and runs with it, to haltingly amusing effect. While both the
particulars of its narrative and its execution provide plenty of
hang-ups, there are — as the university of life teaches us — enjoyments
to be found in the journey. In the sage words of .38 Special,
“Hang on loosely/And don’t let go.”
Accepted centers on enterprising teenager Bartleby, or “B” (a
winning Justin Long), an inveterate dreamer and graduating high-school
senior who, after getting rejected by every university to which he
applies, creates a fake college to serve as a temporary refuge for him
and some friends. Several of B’s friends opt in on his scheme, and
together they design a fake Web site for the school and secure a
brick-and-mortar location courtesy of a local abandoned mental
hospital. Voila! Like that, the South Harmon Institute of Technology is
born (and yes, that acronym abbreviation gets a full workout). B’s
lifelong best friend, Sherman (Jonah Hill), actually gets into a nearby
school as a legacy, but helps his pal by convincing his burnout uncle,
Ben (Lewis Black), to pose as the college’s dean in a meet and greet
with B’s parents.
In an amusingly capricious twist, though, Sherman has accidentally
activated a chirpy “Acceptance is only one click away!” link on the
aforementioned Web site, and soon, dozens of other college rejects from
out of town show up for classes. Naturally, because there has to be a
girl, B falls for Monica (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’
Blake Lively), and naturally, because there has to be a villainous dean
of a nearby competing college who is angling for a consolidation of
space in a land grab, there’s the sneering Dean Van Horne (The Silence of the Lambs’
Anthony Heald). Against considerable odds, B and his friends forge
ahead with maintaining a fake but quasi-functional university, one that
operates by their own set of liberal rules.
As the co-screenwriter of deeply loved cult comedic baubles Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity,
Steve Pink helped locate the unique humor in both violently clashing
cultures and slacker ethos, and you’ll see some of that same
idiosyncratic stamp of personality on this, his directorial debut.
Still, despite Pink’s best efforts, the movie’s narrative track is not
a particularly well-oiled one. Adults are generally either sternly
hectoring or oblivious (sometimes a scene calls for both), and the
character of Uncle Ben never codifies into something more than a
one-note counterpoint to these cardboard types.
Still, if audiences turn off their brains, they can have some fun.
Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Mark Perez’s script is all
synthetic, but
what Accepted most has going for it is a few
pockets of genuine energy. These are provided chiefly by Long — a
gifted young comedic actor who also astutely locates the frustrated
rectitude in his character — and Hill, who conveys the antsy anxiety of
bottled-up adolescence through a collection of pithy one-liners (“This
place is great, because I can finally get hepatitis,” he says of
scouting the abandoned mental facility that becomes South Harmon) and
constipated physicality. He’s the friend you had in high school that
always considered the after-effects of your latest harebrained scheme —
a reluctant voice of conscience by virtue of indoctrination. (
For an interview with Steve Pink, meanwhile, click here.)
(Universal, PG-13, 93 mins.) 
