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accepted

Movies in many ways inherit their genres and their genremes (as we have come to call the minimal units that establish and fulfill genre expectations) from earlier forms, theater and literature most obviously. They have in turn modified old and developed new genre codes, with all the inevitability of medium specificity: the soundtrack accompaniment to episodes of horror, romance, or suspense, e.g., or the plot horizons required to manage the absurd beauty of Hollywood actors in "real" roles.

But once a genreme is in place, it can no more be abandoned than it could in the Russian folktale; to jettison such a thing would be to jettison the genre itself. And so it is occasionally amusing to watch a film wrestle with a genreme to which it is utterly indifferent, even if — perhaps especially if — this wrestling takes the form of cheerful laziness.

And so it goes in Accepted. Ostensibly the story of how the Mac guy starts an open, student-run university organized by elective affinities, literally a former insane asylum, now run by the inmates — and thus in distinction to the high-class, top-down bureaucracy up the road (is this still the Mac/PC parable? Or is it about the Sorbonne 1968? Who can tell anymore?) — the film still remains compelled to include a subnarrative about the hot girl after whom Mac guy longs, but who is of course dating blandly totalitarian PC guy. And of course, as these things go, she eventually sees that her alpha guy is actually a jerk, and that the sweet boy who used to mow her lawn is in fact a quirky charmer with a true heart blah blah blah.

What's actually charming is how this pro forma narrative is played out in a haphazardly pro forma way: no drama, no tension, not much time wasted. Presented with the choice, she makes the right one in fairly short order and that's pretty much that, excepting one later pro forma reversal which is itself reversed pro forma in about twelve seconds of screen time. Max.

The film doesn't have the desire to flout openly or mock genre conventions (itself a genre, natch); it just can't be bothered to treat them as requiring much investment at all, and dispatches them with cheerful laziness. It's just getting by, fulfilling the minimum requirements without ever pretending they have any value, not letting them interfere with the fun — doing just enough to avoid getting kicked out and sent home. In that regard, the film is a perfectly realist account of the college experience for any reasonable student, after all.

Posted by jane at September 7, 2006 09:02 AM | TrackBack