Radnor: Liberal Arts (2012)

Josh Radnor’s second film sees him as Jesse Fisher, a New York university admissions manager who returns to his Ohio liberal arts college to attend the retirement ceremony of his favourite professor, Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins). While he’s there, he meets Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a precocious undergraduate, and they quickly develop a rapport that straddles a fine line between friendship and romance. When Jesse returns to New York, they keep in contact, and most of the film follows their relationship, especially Jesse’s indecision whether to remain in New York or return to Ohio. As that might suggest, it’s quite devoid of the instant gratification that usually fascinates college movies – if anything, returning to Ohio brings out all Jesse’s courtliest instincts, not just towards Zibby, but towards everybody; there’s a sense that every relationship he forms is artfully and exquisitely cultivated, regardless of whether it’s romantic or platonic. That works perfectly with Radnor’s cautious, hesitant acting style, as well as preventing it ever feeling precious or po-faced – it’s simply the manner of someone who’s anxious to cultivate every encounter into a conversation. Given that Jesse and Zibby’s relationship is largely long-distance, even or especially when they’re in the same town, that means that Jesse also spends a great deal of time crafting their epistolary exchanges, perhaps explaining why the film feels so alive to social media as a new kind of writerly milieu - flicking through letters and scrolling through iPods come to feel like the same thing, collapsed into a  tactile, textural proximity to the written word that blends the screenplay into the substance of the film in quite an original way; you feel the precise pressure and punctuation of every word that Radnor writes, but that’s also what prevents it ever feeling wordy or overwritten. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that the narrative somewhat demystifies liberal arts as a career option – Jesse remains an admissions manager, while Hoberg turns out disappointed – but that just makes it feel more alive as an ethos, as Jesse learns to approach every conversation with the tremulous vulnerability of both student and mentor, in a touching, tender vision of indie old age.