Liberal Arts (2012)

rating: ****

the story: A thirty-something unexpectedly reconnects with his college self when visiting a retiring professor.

review: Josh Radnor's bid to be recognized in the same league as Zach Braff, Liberal Arts is the kind of small film that reminds you why small films are important, too.  Like Braff (best known for Scrubs before making a brief transition into film glory with Garden State), Radnor is best known for his starring role in a sitcom (How I Met Your Mother) but subsequently made a push into making his own movies.  Liberal Arts was the second of two movies he's directed to date. 

It's the story of the struggle to reconcile real life with the kind experienced in college.  Radnor's character feels lost in the real world.  Everything he valued in college seems meaningless outside of it.  At college, literature and poetry didn't feel out of place. 

Any good review will tell you why the reviewer feels connected to that particular material.  Radnor's thoughts are much my own.  Even working at a bookstore for five years wasn't anywhere close to the literary immersion I experienced at college.  I often found myself wondering who these book people were who showed up at the store, because I never really recognized them.  Sure, they read, but they didn't seem to feel any of it.  It was just an obligation to them.  For a lot of students, reading is an obligation, too, but the sheer volume of students means there's a greater chance of finding, inside and out of the classroom, other people who get it, who aren't just going through the motions. 

But Liberal Arts ultimately concludes that you need to stick your head out of the books, too, and while it's not a new message, and the story feels like a collegiate exercise, it's done with conviction, it feels real.  It doesn't attempt to give you all the answers.  Like Radnor's work in How I Met Your Mother, it's a subtle reminder that life is a struggle for everyone, but that magic can sometimes happen, too, mostly in the connections we make along the way.  Radnor's old professor is played by Richard Jenkins, who has cornered the market on this kind of character, who's aged and agitated, but also a welcome presence, someone you want around.  Allison Janney plays Radnor's favorite poetry professor, and while her part is smaller and more stereotypical, even she gets to have an open ending.  Zac Efron has a small but memorable part as a kind of spiritual guru, a part he would probably never have played outside of this film.  Elizabeth Olsen, the kid sister of the famous twins, had a breakout role as the college girl who nudges Radnor along to better understanding his predicament.  Elizabeth Reaser gets to benefit from that as the bookseller who becomes his girlfriend.

Maybe it's a movie that speaks so directly to me, with a lead actor I already like, and so that's why I think it's good.  And maybe it's just one of those movies that fills a whole in the cultural narrative, and its value is objectively visible, and you just need someone like me to help point it out.  I wish Radnor had gotten to make more movies (there's obviously still time).  He and Braff are representing an entire generation, one that can easily get lost in the shuffle, a generation that took a lot of things for granted and started finding out that not everything benefited them the way they thought it would.  This is the kind of stuff a previous generation (or two or three) of movie stars got to make whole careers out of.  And this is what it looks like today.