Liberal Arts

Overview

Each individual member of How I Met Your Mother seems to do something cool. Jason Segel resurrected the Muppets. Neil Patrick Harris produces interactive theatre and dresses his adorable babies in adorably elaborate Halloween costumes. Alyson Hannigan was Willow freakin' Rosenberg. When you break it down, the omnipresent sitcom might be less than the sum of its parts.

Josh Radnor, the personal pronoun of How I Met Your Mother, follows suit by being an indie film writer and director of some repute, having won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for 2010's happythankyoumoreplease. His newbie, Liberal Arts, is about a 35-year-old demi-achiever, Jesse (Radnor), who works a dull job as a university admissions officer and reads dead-tree books constantly, while walking even.

When he visits his alma mater to honour his retiring former professor, Peter (Richard Jenkins), Jesse also starts a romance with sparky 19-year-old student Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen). Between her exuberance for new knowledge and the campus's leafy, Midwestern nourishment, he rediscovers some of the wide-eyed optimism of his own college days — and also learns why he can't have them back.

Really, you can't blame anyone for falling a bit in love with Olsen. She elevates the whole movie, bringing a flood of beauty and intelligence to a character already written to be quite beautiful and quite intelligent. She's not a manic pixie dream girl, although the film pales from being made in an MPDG world. The story of 'unremarkable pre-middle-aged male seeks shaking up, via female, into remarkable life' is a little tired. Sure, seedy, equivocating men deserve our empathy, but arguably they've already had their time in the sun. We know you shouldn't sleep with the girl; we don't need to see your working out.

There are other flaws in the film that follow on from all this obviousness: One character, Dean (John Magaro), a random student among thousands, appears in front of Jesse 'by coincidence' with such frequency he'd have to be a ghost stalking our protagonist (he's not), and his arc becomes too foreseeable. Perhaps Liberal Arts would have meant something more if all these other characters didn't so perfectly serve Jesse. They awaken him, confront him, absolve him, and release him.

That said, arts graduates will nod in recognition of post-modern theory references, and Allison Janney fans will delight in her cameo as an ironically hard-hearted Romantics professors. There are several estimable bon mots. Liberal Arts may make a forgettable thesis, but you'd still find a couple of passages within it to highlight.