Just Searching for a Place of Their Own

There was a time where it seemed like Justin Long would be the next big comedy sensation. He'd starred in films like Galaxy Quest and Dodgeball and it seemed like he was being groomed to take over from the likes of Vince Vaughn. He had the patter, he could handle comedy with aplomb. So what happened?

That's hard to say exactly, although certainly he had a string of vehicles that didn't really perform all that well at the Box Office. Accepted, the 2006 slacker comedy certainly didn't do as well as the studio would have hoped, only making back $38.6 Mil on its $23 Mil budget (which likely wasn't enough to cover advertising costs). And while audiences that actually turned out seemed to enjoy the film it was absolutely raked over the coals by critics. Justin's star already seemed to be fading.

Is that really a fair assessment? Certainly he had another big part after in the little loved (but still successful) Live Free or Die Hard, but that was the last really big project to come from the actor. He's been in plenty of projects since they but none of the same caliber, mostly just floating under the radar, reducing the actor to another "hey, it's that guy" whenever he shows up on screen. Jonah Hill and Blake Lively, who were also in Accepted, went on to bigger and better things but this movie rested on Long's shoulders and he seems to have suffered for it.

Thing is, I actually rather enjoy Accepted. It's not a very deep movie, and frankly the plot is rather ridiculous the second you think about it for too long, but the film (like the fictional school at the center of the story) has its heart in the right place. Plus it's actually a really funny, somewhat raunchy comedy. It works with the same kind of themes as your Animal Houses and Ferrises Bueller while also striking out for a bit of a message. Whether that will resonate with your or not, I think, really depends on the generation you hail from.

In the film we're introduced to Bartleby "B" Gaines (Long) a slacker around school who always had a scheme, and a way to talk himself out of trouble, up his sleeve. While he certainly dedicated himself to getting by, he failed to actually do anything noteworthy enough for a school to want to take him in and, thus, eight different colleges all rejected him. Facing a summer of his parents giving him disappointed lectures, B came up with the perfect idea: he'd just fake an acceptance letter from a school and coast for the summer while he came up with a better plan. He also looped one of his friends in, football player (who lost his scholarship due to an injury) Darryl (Columbus Short).

Only problem is that once his letter passes his dad's muster, then his parents want to drop him off at school start of the semester. So then he has to fake a college campus. Looping in more friends -- his best friend Sherman Schrader (Jonah Hill), brainy over-achiever Rory (Maria Thayer), and goofy doofus Glen (Adam Herschman) -- they then rent a cheap, dilapidated mental hospital and make it into a campus and fill it with volunteer ringers to make it pass inspection. They also hire a fake dead, ex-teacher Ben Lewis (Lewis Black), so the parents can meet the dean. And it goes well until they realize that the fake website they made was actually accepting anyone that applied to their school. Suddenly they had a school full of college students and no way to know what to do... so they ask the students what they want to learn, and suddenly the party school actually starts teaching all on its own. But can a fake school become a real place just by force of will alone?

Watching Accepted this time (after having watched it a ton in the past), I did recognize that the film is hugely implausible. Considering they had three months to pull off the scheme and very limited resources, there was no way they could rent a building, fix it up, and make it work as a school, let alone well enough for the few hundred students that just magically showed up. Of course, how would anyone even know that the website for the school could exist for anyone to actually use it. Considering how hard it is to get a website noticed even if you advertise it, some random site out in the middle of the boonies of the web would never attract attention. But even then, the school would have died within days because four teenagers would never be able to keep it functioning before someone got injured, or died, or any one of a number of other crimes. It's an ideal, a fantasy, not something that could be a reality.

Meanwhile, the film has to have a villain and he's as preposterous as the film itself. Dean Richard Van Horne (Anthony Heald) is that villain and he's there because a movie like this always has to have a some hard ass that wants to get in the way of the college kids just having a good time. His plot is that he wants to buy up all the land around his college, Harmon College (as opposed to out band of merry student, the South Harmon Institute of Technology and, yet, you can spell out the acronym) so he can build a big gateway to make his college seem more exclusive. it really makes no sense but is only there so we can have Harmon pitted against South Harmon (a school they wouldn't have noticed were it not for their need for land). Like, all the pieces barely fit together to make a real story and it makes the overall plot of Accepted a little creaky.

There was probably a way to make a story using these characters work better. Van Horne makes a point, near the end of the film, that "schools like South Harmon" give a bad name to other, real schools" and I think there's value it looking at his point and analyzing it. If, say, the film had pit Van Horne against South Harmon because they used the bigger college's name, and then he learned about the way they were teaching and learning and his big complaint was because they were a fraudulent school that wasn't accredited and didn't teach "properly", I could see that point. He'd be wrong, as we see real learning happening around all the partying at S. Harmon, but that would set up a real "Slobs vs. Snobs" story that could work. The "Van Horne Gateway" plot is a non-starter and just makes the Dean, and his lackeys, into clueless, entitled idiots. Not the kind of villains you need here.

The thing is that South Harmon, despite being a fake school, becomes a real school with real learning done "their way", and the movie sells you on their point well enough that you already know they're right. The film needed a better argument for an against so that it could feel like the movie was really exploring its own themes. There is no way a school like this could start, but since we've already suspended disbelief and gotten this far, at least take the concept just seriously enough (around all the jokes, skits, and Millennial-geared music) that we can get invested in the story from all sides.

The film manages to get along as well as it does (and be one of those movies you go back to and watch again and again) because it is very funny. While his star has faded in later years, Long really does a commendable job carrying this movie. He has that dry patter that made so much of the dialogue work, and he could also invest in his character, making him more than just a "fixer" trope. Bartleby really is the hero of the film and it's a credit to Long that he carries it so well. The movie knows it can always cut to him for a joke, or a reaction, or anything and it would sell any scene.

Of course, it does populate the movie with solid actors around him, from Hill (who also it good for a number of laughs), to Blake Lively (who, while not a comedienne does invest in her character), and Lewis Black (basically playing Lewis Black). It's a great cast that carry the film with Long, making the world believable in its own way, as silly as the whole concept may be. I like the film because it's fun hanging out with these characters and seeing this idea kind of learning happening.

Sure, I can see why people may not have liked the film -- it's far from perfect. I also think you really need to have a certain outlook, that realization that the world we all bought into may not be real. Did the system fail you? Did you end up following your passions or just settling. With Accepted the message is that it's never too late, you just have to want to learn and better yourself.