Give the people behind “Post Grad” credit for this much: Instead of high concept, they’ve gone low concept; nothing much happens in this movie at all.
The film has a premise: New college graduate Ryden (Alexis Bledel) finds herself at loose ends for the summer, her master plan of getting a job at a hip L.A. publishing house and becoming a world-famous editor being abruptly scuttled.
Basically she spends the movie going on job interviews, hanging around her zany family and flirting with the foreign dude (Rodrigo Santoro) who lives down the block.
Ryden’s best platonic bud, an adoring doormat (Zach Gilford of “Friday Night Lights”) who’s given her brotherly foot rubs for years, continues his life of crushing disappointment (and, presumably, cold showers) as he pursues the object of his affection.
Ryden’s family is promising, if only on the level of casting: Michael Keaton and Jane Lynch as the parents, Carol Burnett as grandma. Keaton gets some manic energy going as the Mr. Fix-It dad, but there are too few opportunities per pound of comic talent here.
Look at these ingredients and then imagine what the late John Hughes might’ve whipped together with them.
Surely the disappointed suitor (the Anthony Michael Hall/Jon Cryer character) would have had some comic juice and the parents would get more room to be weird, lovable types.
Instead, “Shrek” co-director Vicky Jenson settles for a pleasant, amiable approach that simply doesn’t stick to the wall. Which means that the brighter moments make it all the stranger when an entire comedy sequence is built around the killing of a house cat, for instance.
Alexis Bledel, formerly the co-star of “Gilmore Girls,” is a likable sort, but she looks as though she’s fighting to locate her character in the vagueness of the story.
Is Ryden a “Legally Blonde” dynamo or a “Juno” wisecracker or a “Garden State” soul-searcher?
Nobody seems to have settled on the answer.
As the title suggests, there’s another movie looming over this one: “The Graduate,” which took the same situation and captured an entire era with it. Something tells me “Post Grad” is not destined for similar longevity.
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