Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts is an indie campus comedy that is sweet-natured and high-minded, a seductive drama of youth and age; innocence and experience. It's a poignant network of May-to-December relationships.
It has to be conceded there's a fair bit of sugar in the mix, and finally it turns out to be an oddly conservative picture, less daring and perhaps less romantic than we were promised. I also had mixed feelings about a supporting character called Ana, played by Elizabeth Reaser. But it has a beautifully judged leading performance from Elizabeth Olsen – terrifically easy and natural movie-acting – and the movie is sharp and funny on the subject of why older people are attractive to the young, as long, of course, as they are not yuckily too old. Their worldliness, disillusion and unavailability get dangerously alchemised into sexiness, just when it's not cool to take advantage. It is a process with irony as its byproduct, and irony is incidentally crucial for attempting a critical comparison with Woody Allen.
Radnor is the star as well as the writer and director, and this has arguably resulted in a pretty blank, undemonstrative performance, and yet it is probably the only way to play the character without being cutesy. He is Jesse, a single thirtysomething guy in New York who loved studying and still loves it: he took English literature, specialising in the romantics, and his job in academia means he can stay close to that scholarly flame, but he is stuck in admissions, a boring business of interviewing potential students. Then he gets a letter from his old college professor, an unrepentant 60s radical called Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins) who has grumpily announced his retirement and has invited Jesse to the farewell dinner.
Jesse is touched to be singled out like this, the more so on finding how quietly emotional Hoberg is to see him. But his weekend back at his old college is to be fraught with difficulty. The day after the subdued and embarrassing valedictory dinner, Hoberg panics, deciding he doesn't want to collapse into retirement and old age yet, and begs the dean to cancel the whole thing. And Radnor shows how it is importantly in tandem with Hoberg's grotesquely humiliating situation that Jesse meets a beautiful 19-year-old student called Zibby (Olsen) and they instantly click: Jesse wonders if his new older-man status entitles him to come back to his old haunts on the weekend, hang out and have the glorious romantic affair that was never a possibility the first time around.
I couldn't help laughing at the most outrageously goofy scene: Jesse is just so thrilled to be back on his old campus that he rushes around in an ecstasy of nostalgia, capering over the lawns, swooning at the sight of people reading, strumming guitars and, yes, throwing Frisbees. And, hilariously, once his ambiguous friendship with Zibby is up and running, Jesse gets easily back into the swing of student life: queueing up for lunch with his tray in the refectory, standing in the corner at parties, grimacing apologetically at Zibby's roommate who has to clear out when they need some alone time. He is 35 years old, yet looks almost young enough for this not to be creepy. Almost. And of course, modern pop culture has imbued in him a fatal self-consciousness about convention and how things look – things that would not worry the romantic poets.
The best scene comes when Zibby gives Jesse a "mix tape" CD that turns out to be classical music, and he gets an education from her. Radnor creates a clever, funny montage of Jesse wandering around New York listening to this novel music, while a voiceover narrates the old-fashioned pen-and-paper letters he's writing to Zibby.
Yet all the time other difficult relationships are emerging, relationships that Radnor playfully juxtaposes with the main event. Jesse still has a crush on one of his old lecturers, an elegant older woman called Prof Judith Fairfield, played by Allison Janney. And Hoberg has feelings not unlike those of a spurned lover when he realises that Jesse is coming up to college regularly – but not to see him. These are smart touches. Less successful are the minor male characters that pop up: a wacky quasi-stoner called Nat (Zac Efron) and a troubled A-student called Dean (John Magaro) in conjunction with whom David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest is invoked: a bit of a groanworthy moment.
Despite a misjudged ending, Liberal Arts is a decent, heart-on-the-sleeve movie; it pays its audience the compliment of treating us like intelligent people.
