Josh Radnor is a nice-looking, button-eyed, completely harmless sitcom personality (“How I Met Your Mother,” apparently) who has gotten the impression he’s a filmmaker.
“Liberal Arts” comes to us produced by Josh Radnor. Written by Josh Radnor. Starring Josh Radnor. Josh Radnor is much like Woody Allen, except for the talent. He comes creeping softly into theaters to offer exquisitely tender “moments” and “comedy” punch lines crafted with all of the endearing earnestness of the slightly wobbly bookcase a middle-schooler brings home from shop class. This movie badly needs a laugh track to cover up the awkward silences that follow Radnor’s attempts at cleverness.
Radnor plays a bored admissions officer at a New York college who returns to his Kenyon College-like Ohio alma mater to celebrate the retirement of his second-favorite professor (Richard Jenkins). A supposedly edgy improv actress (Elizabeth Olsen) becomes smitten with him and instantly turns gooey and romantic. Because 19-year-old students find lactating 35-year-old losers like him fascinating. She was born in the ’90s. He has the sentimentality of someone in his 90s.
The two exchange letters when he’s back in New York, and talk about books and feelings (“That said,” he writes, “I’ve been feeling lately the stirrings of something I can only call growth.”) But he’ll soon be back on her campus for sitcom gags (like a roommate bursting in on a frisky couple) and sitcom solutions (like a buck-up, you’re-great speech to a suicidal young genius whose depression is surely curable by a touch of Radnorian wisdom).
I don’t normally stomp on the heads of fuzzy kittens and newborn pups (not unless the price is right), and as mentioned, Radnor seems thoughtful, sweet and closely attentive to the deepest stirrings of his own growth. But couldn’t he have kept all of this to himself, or at least stashed it someplace where I stand no chance of accidentally encountering it, such as CBS? To put it another way, someday this alleged guy should try to get in touch with his masculine side.