dvd review: the post-grad survival guide

The Post-Grad Survival Guide is a stereotypical, clichéd romantic-comedy.  This would be fine, except that in the last quarter the film also decides that it needs to portray a stereotypical, clichéd, romance-obsessed representation of women.

Post Grad is about a pre-life crisis.  Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) has just graduated from college and has her whole life planned out.  Except that her plans include getting a job, and getting a job that doesn’t require the repeated use of the phrase “Would you like fries with that?” is harder than it appears.  When her dream-job at publishing house Happerman & Browning is given to her academic arch-nemesis, Ryden is forced to move back in with her parents, where she interviews endlessly, helps her brother build a box-cart and spends a lot of time with her best-friend-who-is-obviously-in-love-with-her Adam (Zach Gilford).

There are some genuinely funny and sweet moments – but a few moments are not enough to carry a film that meanders aimlessly towards its conclusion.  If you were being generous, you could hypothesise that the directionless form of the film is an attempt to imitate the directionless nature of Ryden’s life.  But really, it’s probably best explained by bad script writing.

The real failure of tis film, however, is the ending.  Although the obvious moral message was always going to be “it doesn’t matter what you do with your life, as long as you share it with someone special,” this meaning is taken to a nauseating extreme.  Ryden’s character is supposedly smart, sassy and driven.  Until, that is, she falls in love.  Suddenly ‘smart’ is a thing of the past, and ‘devoting yourself to your man’ is the way of the future.  Rather than attempting to tell a realistic story – or, you know, show the beauty of a balanced life – the audience is expected to stomach a sugar-sweet, archaic and insulting ideal.  That is, a woman must give up her career to find love.

This film is inappropriately titled as a ‘post-grad survival guide.’  If one were to follow the advice given in the film, it wouldn’t be self-help; it would be self-sabotage.