SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Turfseer Liberal Arts was written and directed by Josh Radnor, primarily known for his role on the CBS TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Radnor's protagonist here is Jesse Fischer, a 35 year old college admissions officer at an unnamed NYC institution of higher learning, presumably NYU. Radnor goes very light on Jesse's backstory, only cluing us in that he's dissatisfied with his job (the opening sequence features Jesse speaking to a coterie of unseen students about the pitfalls of the admission process) and that he's in the last throes of an unsatisfying relationship with a girlfriend.The inciting incident occurs when Jesse receives a call from his former English professor, Peter Holberg (Richard Jenkins), who invites him up to his Alma mater to attend the professor's retirement ceremony. Jesse drives up to the school (the scenes were filmed at Radnor's Alma mater, Kenyon College) in Ohio. At this point you might likely presume that Radnor's protagonist is based on autobiographical material.The principal thrust of the story concerns Jesse's relationship with Zibby, a 19 year old student at the school and daughter of Professor Holberg's friends played by a miscast Elizabeth Olsen--who was 23 during filming and looking much more mature than a co-ed in her sophomore year. After initially meeting, the two, both literature mavens, agree to correspond through regular snail mail. In a series of montages and voice overs, Zibby clues Jesse into the wonders of classical music (for some reason while growing up Jesse never became familiar with any well known classical composers), and he ends up traipsing about NYC enraptured with familiar sites while listening to noted classical music compositions on his headphones.Eventually the mismatched couple have a disagreement over taste in literature: Jesse feels Zibby is wasting her time indulging her inner aesthete by embracing a "Twilight-like" vampire trilogy; Zibby on the other hand makes no bones about enjoying such mindless but entertaining "literature." The dark moment at the end of the Second Act occurs when the earnest Jesse refuses to sleep with Zibby, who reveals she is a virgin.Radnor injects a series of secondary characters and subplots to perhaps spice things up a bit considering how thin his main plot between Jesse and Zibby turns out to be. Jesse meets Nat (Zac Efron) a non-student hipster who teaches Jesse how to loosen up. And then there's Dean (John Magaro), a depressed, bipolar student who Jesse saves from killing himself, after he ingests a gaggle of unidentified pills. Finally, there's Professor Judith Fairchild, who Jesse reveres as his number one professor, from his heady days as an undergraduate. Fairchild invites Jesse back for a one-night stand but cynically kicks him out of her home afterward, deriding him for not being manly enough and as world- weary as she.Somehow Radnor would like us to be impressed with Jesse's "growth," although it's difficult to perceive such progress when we learn so little about his protagonist in the first place. As it turns out, Jesse at film's end meets another woman, Ana (Elizabeth Reaser), a bookstore employee and lover of books (just like Jesse), and they walk into the sunset happily ever after (Ana is strictly there as Jesse's love interest with little to no character development).In the end, the nature of Radnor's vanity project becomes clear. Jesse really was a mensch all along, only peripherally led off course by the allure of a nubile 19 year old co-ed. The earnest Jesse rejects having "casual" sex which would of course have dire consequences for the perky but immature Zibby. Throw in playing the mentor to the confused Dean, a buddy to the semi-zany Nat and a disillusioned but now world wise "Benjamin" to Professor Fairchild's "Mrs. Robinson," and one is left with another typical indie replete with the obligatory glacial pacing and comatose narrative.

canozer123 I went on to watch this film with the expectation that it's just another one of those movies that romanticize and praise a certain style of living that too many movies have already been doing. Though some of them are among my all-time favorite movies, like almost all Woody Allen films, there's some narrow-minded, almost snobbish element in them which suggests that this is the cool lifestyle to be living (by this, I mean being a sarcastic, hating-on-the-new-generation New Yorker who loves literature and philosophy).But Liberal Arts offer various perspectives on life which are never really encouraged or discouraged in the movie. Yes, "you should read books but also go out some time" is the thematic prescription that is given to book-lover viewers, but it is not presented too strongly; it is not the central motive of the movie around which the narrative is constructed, but it is the outcome of a narrative that just happens to occur without a thematic goal for it to reach. Teaching romantics without being a romantic, reading so many books to escape the social sphere, reading too many books to miss on the social sphere, being a conspiracy theorist/stoner, being old but feeling young, being young but wanting to be old; each of these perspectives on life is, while all of them are modestly presented in the film, neither glorified nor looked down upon.Liberal Arts tells a story that is not told with a screamingly loud subtext. It's just a well-presented humble story of which we sadly do not get a lot these days.

john32935 Going for the triple play, writer-director-lead actor Josh Radnor concocts a sweet story of aging and the attempt to recapture youth. But as the lead character learns, and as anyone who has ever gone back to their college campus years after graduation knows, you realize your formerly special place and the people there have moved on without you. Attempts to recapture old glories generally fail, but that does not mean new glories do not await.The supporting cast is excellent. The story has enough twists and avoids (most) clichés. And while the dramatic tension is only mid-range, the movie takes the viewer on a pleasant ride with just a touch of bittersweet nostalgia. Lastly, the dialog is realistic and just a wee bit witty.

isaaclaughter55 One of the few films which makes you laugh, think and feel deeply. It made me think on its messages long after viewing, on the experience of life in university in the humanities -to formative, shaping experiences.The dialoge is extraordinarily well written and the casting really works to bring out the heart of the film. Every character contributes profound insight in an understated manner. The film deals with the divide between the arriving encroachment of mundane adulthood. The film is many things, but above all, an ode to the experience of being in school, in liberal arts college.