Looks like Chris Smith and Netflix have found a wonderful pairing with each other, bonding over their love for zeitgeist stories of privileged people getting their just, luxurious desserts. After partying at the Caribbean Fyre Festival, Smith and Netflix turn their attention to college campuses. The college admissions scandal was built for news/tabloid fodder, but like with Fyre, Smith digs into the mechanics of the scandal to tell a rich, easy to follow story of how the other half lives, and gets away with whatever they want. Everywhere you look, you just get angrier, and angrier.
For those who don’t remember, the college admissions scandal dominated the headlines for a chunk of 2019. Essentially multiple very rich people, including celebrities like Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, paid large sums of money to a man, William Singer, to help get their children into the college of their dreams by entering through “the side door.” Smith’s doc uses reenactments to look at Singer’s life, and how his go-getter mentality convinced parents and college admissions alike to buy into opening that side door for their unknowing, but totally lucky kids.
One of the hardest choices a documentarian has to make is to define the scope of the story he’s trying to tell. Chris Smith, like in his Fyre doc, works from the top down, starting the focus of his story on the man at the top and working down to the people he conned. William Singer (Matthew Modine plays him in reenactments, you’ll be “shocked” to learn he didn’t exactly want to participate in a movie that tears his career to shreds), like Fyre’s Billy McFarland, Smith portrays Singer as a man who’s completely bought into his own bullsh*t, convinced he’s selling something that has terrific results for everyone involved, working around the morality of the situation and within the system as constructed. However, Smith gives Singer layers: if the con man were at all altruistic, he’d be celebrated as an American hero, working tirelessly and harder than anyone to get that American dream. Smith gives the same layers to the people sucked into Singer’s scheme: parents who want to give their kids whatever they want, by any means necessary. The rich parents’ privileged view of the world makes them fail to see how their efforts are more built on maintaining status than necessity, and what they’re really doing is perpetuating a system designed to only benefit themselves at the expense of other kids who’ve merited themselves into the upper echelon of society. It’s infuriating, but understandable, the right tonal note for Operation Varsity Blues.
While the scope Chris Smith chose was good for a tight hour and a half ish documentary about what happened, there’s hints at a bigger, more interesting story I wish the talented documentarian had focused on. As Smith digs into how William Singer got his “side doors” opened, he uncovers all sorts of unhealthy relationships between colleges/universities and money, which should have been the focus of the doc. In Operation Varsity Blues alone we see how money affects student athletes, ACT/SAT test prep, the admissions officers, alumni fundraising, and the college ranking system alone, but at a surface level, giving us the bullet points of how the college application process works. Had Smith used this college admissions scandal as an entry into university economies, that would have been something truly special and forced an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about the haves and have nots and how universities perpetuate the inequality cycle. Smith smartly does show us the human side of the have nots here: watching these excited poor high school kids get rejected from their dream schools is as heartbreaking as you’d expect, but he does miss a bit of the big picture of this story in the process.
It does seem like Netflix gets the best out of these “from the headlines” stories don’t they? While Smith’s documentary is captivating, I would like to hear from one of those kids who got in through Singer’s side door. And because I’m an idiot, I would have asked them if they’ve seen the 1999 movie Varsity Blues. And I would have asked them if they considered giving the James Van Der Beek speech to their parents about their “dream” school they “had” to get into. Can you imagine Olivia Jade getting asked that on camera? Now that’s a documentary moment! Just me? Ok, got it.