It’s odd that just mere weeks after the death of John Hughes we get a movie that’s so awkwardly Hughesian. Post Grad tries to balance a real kind of character element within an unrealistic, fairy tale like motif that made the best of John Hughes work modern classical: you can win Prince Charming’s heart (Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles); you can cross the high school clique divide (Breakfast Club); and the sun can shine out of your butt (Ferris Bueller). In Post Grad, every one but you gets to graduate from college, find their dream job, find their niche in the world, and go on to really great lives while you move back home and get a McJob. Yeah, read some government statistics on that sometime.
Post Grad should be a star vehicle for Alexis Bledel, former Gilmore Girl, former sister of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, and all around good egg. She may be cute and have really piercing blue eyes, but her voice tends to strain whiny. No offense, but when your character is basically driven through the plot by one gigantic whine, you really don’t need to reinforce the point. Bledel’s character, Ryden Malby, is from the Ally McBeal school of life philosophy, also known as the glass is half empty. Till the moment the graduation gown came off, she had the world by the oysters. She knew exactly what she wanted to do and was supremely confident she’d get their. Culture shock: sometimes you don’t get your dream job your first time at bat.
Like many young women in movies these days, Ryden has a gay best friend who here is named Adam (Zach Gilford). The twist is that he doesn’t know that he’s gay, and in fact thinks that he’s desperately in love with Ryden to the point that he’d probably ditch law school at Columbia and stay in LA as a laid back indie singer/song-writer if she just gives him a sign. So I’m making up the part about “the gay best friend,” but come on, I’ve haven’t seen a guy pine this hard for a girl since Charlie Brown over the Little Red Haired Girl. Ant that’s especially when he’s on the fast-track to one of the pre-eminent law schools in America AND is a halfway decent musician with his own band. Is it a little unreasonable to think that this guy would be a player rather than waiting on Ryden’s front stoop for her to get home after she stands up their “friendly” dinner date? Doubtful.
What’s more is that the most interesting (read: funnier) stuff in the movie has nothing to do with the two main characters, but rather with Ryden’s slightly, off-kilter family. Michael Keaton plays her dad who comes across as a distant relative to Tim Allen’s Home Improvement character but with the deluded self-actualization of Homer Simpson. Between his get-rich-quick schemes and his woebegotten inventions, Keaton’s slightly mad look in the eyes serves him well, the audience too. The always terrific Jane Lynch (the cocaine lady from Role Models) plays Ryden’s Mom, and Carol Burnett gets in a few laughs as Ryden’s oxygen tank carrying grandmother.
To a point, even the film itself acknowledges that Ryden’s oddball family is the funniest part of this thing. A great deal of time in its 90 minutes are expended on subplots like Ryden’s dad trying to sell stolen novelty belt buckles (though he doesn’t know they were stolen) and Ryden’s kid brother pestering about a building a soapbox derby racer, or grandma shopping for her casket. But while, by and large, this is the stuff that worked, I found myself thinking: isn’t this supposed to be a movie about a young woman trying to make her way in the world after graduation, not about how odd one family can be? Way to not believe in the power of your own material screenwriter Kelly Fremon. And I’m afraid that Vicky Jenson is limited by her experiences telling animated characters what to do in films like Sharktale and Shrek.
Sadly, the record amount of hilarious material that could be mined out of the film’s central predicament is left buried in favour of your typical coming-of-age movie clichés like following your dream and being true to yourself. Never mind that Ryden’s of a generation that’s gotten the world handed to them on a silver platter and finding out that the real world can be cruel to those that have only known kindness. Yes, in the real world sometime is takes a lot of work and guile to land your dream job, and yes, sometimes the snooty girl that’s a narcissist and all around pain in the posterior snatches it right out in front of you because she has better connections. And in the real world, sometimes contrived scripts get millions of dollars invested in them, and they still come out unfunny. That’s life.
