Tanya Fenmore and Jeremy Dauber have crafted a talented, surprising, and satisfying contemporary message movie. Graduation Week (aka The Sterling Chase) provides unhyped appeal to anyone interested in realistic character development. The story concerns a group of young adults in their last week before graduation from elite/prestigious but FICTIONAL Chadley College, and is split into 3 story arcs, each focusing on one of the 3 contenders for the college's Sterling Chase Award (for `loyalty, integrity and strength'). The nominees reinforce the Gnothi Saethon (`Know Thyself') motto-to varying degrees.
One of them is a bright, earnest, but hollowly overconfident African-American youth, Darren Jones (Sean Patrick Thomas) who's eager to launch his career at high-powered private firms. He has no reason to doubt that he's at the pinnacle of those most accepted at Chadley.
The second nominee is chain-smoking campus feminist, Jenna Marino (the fabulous Alanna Ubach). From the outset, she's utterly unconvinced by everyone's pretence to a fair competition amidst all the `politics and a token plaque'.
The final nominee, Alexis Delton (Nicholle Tom) is a senator's daughter who knows exactly what's expected of the winner. Unfortunately she's been living an `unacceptable' lifestyle in her dorm. Now that her parents are grooming her for a political career, Alexis is acutely aware she should start spackling her public facade.
Each nominee has to cope with the expectations of family and friends over their nominations. But as Jenna so ruefully observes, there are politics and nepotism being played out here.
Jenna's overt cynicism helps, but she has a private dilemma: after four years, her bravura feminism `act'/image is getting stale. Secretly, Jenna has intimacy issues as a daughter of absent parents. She doesn't really believe people can care about her, but now even her mask of promiscuity is getting stale. Luckily, she has the two smartest friends on campus: Cathy, her roommate (played equally cynically by Irene Ng, whose performance has mostly ended up on the cutting-room floor), and her radio program host/station DJ, Matt 'Bunz' Bernstein (John Livingston), who has gently teased her for four years over her `male-biting theoretical psychobabble'.
The main cast are all young, but Ubach (a powerhouse performer) and Livingston (Ron's younger brother, who delivers some verbal gymnast lines with surprising ease) leap off the screen and into the annals of sexual tension repartee, probably challenging Speechless (1994) (for economy). These two are instantly familiar and feel just right as college-age combatants, so they're uniquely satisfying to watch. Jenna&Matt supply the most admirable-certainly the most intelligent-adult situations of this movie.
The equal-billing ensemble cast of eight is rounded out by friends of the remaining nominees.
At the other end of the reliable-friend-spectrum, Darren has only his roommate and co-`charity case', Todd Hicks (Jack Noseworthy) for a confidant, but Todd is a very edgy guy. He and Darren have a precarious friendship, since two marginalized men can't be much emotional support to each other; although Darren is prepared to stop skating. Darren's at his best as he finally engages with the real Jenna, a much better support candidate.
Alexis, as already implied, only has gay friends. She rooms with portrait artist Melissa (Andrea Ferrell) but has been dating Chris Monroe (Devon Odessa) for the last six months. Since Alexis' parents are pointedly sending her a more suitable male date from Yale to escort her to her last Chadley dance, she figures this is the time to shed her `gay experience', and with it, her gay lover. It's only later that we draw the parallel: even an expensive education can't defeat inertia and the unacknowledged class system. Underneath a graduate's `piece of laserprinted paper' he/she can remain as compromised as ever-degrees are never in Personality.
The lyrics of Fenmore's self-penned and self-performed song, Spin Around Inside, remind us that the personal costs of `achieving' often include the loss of personal integrity. We all look up to certain people, and down on others, but inside we're quicksand. `So simple to live lies', goes one lyric, but `do you know where your heart is?' `So together but so alone' describes Alexis perfectly.
The casting was crucial. Unfortunately Devon Odessa is completely non-credible here: she plays lipstick lesbian Chris as a vacuous Valley girl, all-shallow and fickle, so that it's really hard to sympathize with her loss. While this provides yet another layer to Chris' personality on top of her surprise past, her `layer' is partly responsible for our lack of connection with this part of the movie.
Darren Jones'(Sean Patrick Thomas') fictionalized `Chadley experience' shows how hard it can be for a black man to fit in at white-dominated colleges, but Thomas' delivery seems stiff-until you realize Darren is subconsciously trying to communicate his discomfiture while `playing the game'. Darren's `act'/image, too, is getting stale.
My last gripe is about the editing. Graduation Week has been parboiled down to an economic rationalist scene where the characters' futures are resolved by revealing the nominees' partners at the graduation ceremony. This ending only serves Alexis' story well, whose look to camera successfully closes the movie with hyper-irony. She's losing her struggle with her integrity; yet her loss-the fact that her `act'/image is also getting stale-is then still only known to her two closest (gay) friends, the audience....and herself.
Other reviewers have thought that the constant shuffling between story arcs shows a high level of editorial sophistication, but to me the sheer volume amounts to over-controlling/`thrashing' (the plots can't even gel with the audience before they're `swapped' out again). Obviously the separate arcs had to be developed concurrently, but so many intercuts were just emotionally/intellectually jarring.
Graduation Week, a very perceptive comment on the many `false notes' struck by personal ambition and fierce competition even at esteemed places of tradition, rates 9/10 (as a nod to Ubach and Livingston, the movie's best proponents). All the more impressive from Fenmore and Dauber, two Phi-Beta-Kappa insiders from Harvard themselves.
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