Enjoy Eshaan M.'s review of Accepted

Enjoy Eshaan M.'s review of Accepted. Accepted offers a unique and intriguing look at the world of selective college admissions in the US; it shows the cost of climbing the social ladder through education and the extent to which people will go to get to the ranks of the country’s intelligentsia.

T.M. Landry College Preparatory is an unconventional K-12 school in a poor rural town in Louisiana famous for sending its students to elite universities like Harvard, Yale, Wellesley and Stanford. Students aim to meet the intense expectations of Mike Landry, the imposing, relentless, rousing-speech-giving founder of the school who has a personal and professional stake in the process. When the New York Times publishes an exposé on T.M. Landry falsifying student transcripts and its controversial and, at-times, abusive methods, the school crumbles. Each senior has to figure out school and the college admissions system on their own from there, and they have to decide for themselves what they are willing to do to get into college.

In his first documentary, director Dan Chen beautifully captures the personal stories of four dynamic students looking to overcome the seemingly insuperable obstacles they face to achieve their dreams. One, for example, has a widowed mother and two disabled sisters, and she must care for them while balancing an 11-hour school day at T.M. Landry. The interviews of the four seniors guide the film, as does interwoven footage of Landry working with students, hyping them up, and continuing his work at home. The film is incredibly well-constructed — holes in T.M. Landry’s story are reflected in the plot (such as when it is revealed that Mike Landry told one of his students to call him when the filming team came to his house so he could project the image of a caring, fatherly figure). The footage is stable; lighting is modulated to reflect the mood of each scene (dark in times of despair, bright in times of hope), and the storytelling is seamless. Accepted keeps your attention throughout; there’s not a single dull moment. As a student going through the admissions process right now (albeit with a very different background and very different schools than those in the film), Accepted resonates with me on an emotional level at various points. It’s one of the best traditional documentaries I’ve watched this year.

Accepted is a film all about finding success with honesty and hard work. Where T.M. Landry fails, as a student says, is that they set out to solve the problem of a ridiculously selective university system, but became a part of the problem by falsifying records and losing integrity.

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