Tina Fey has a pretty impressive resume, but we haven’t seen her in a feature film since she played bored suburban wife Claire Foster in 2010’s Date Night. Now, she’s making her return to the big screen in Focus Features’ dramatic comedy Admission, and we have our hands on the film’s first trailer.
In the film, Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University who spends months evaluating thousands of hopeful college students. A driven woman who lives her life by the book, both at work and in her relationship with a faculty colleague, Mark (played by Micheal Sheen). Visiting an experimental New Hampshire high school submitting applicants, Portia is caught off guard when its co-founder John Halsey (Paul Rudd) turns out to have attended college with her. She is then floored when reminded of the life-altering decision that she made while still a student herself; she had a son, who she gave up for adoption, and who she now realizes may be one of John’s students, the precocious misfit Jeremiah. As Portia’s emotions surge forth, she finds her life turning upside down in embarrassing ways and begins to bend the admissions rules – in the hopes of getting Jeremiah on the best path while perhaps righting her own as well
Rounding out the cast are Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shaw, and Nat Wolff (as Fey’s possible son Jeremiah).
From the trailer it looks like a cute and quirky movie, but it’ll really depend on Fey’s ability to draw in the audience on her own. I was hoping to see some more scenes with the underrated Paul Rudd, who I think is only getting better as an actor, but it really looks like the film will be about the journey of Fey’s character rather than the romance with Rudd’s John Halsey.
Admission is set to hit theaters on March 8th, 2013.
Check out the trailer below and let us know what you think in the comments.