Youth is wasted on the young, but then youth is wasted a lot of the time, especially when it comes to college movies. We oldies just don’t like to admit we’re jealous. If only we had a second chance: we’d do college so much better. We would party harder, we’d be more adventurous, we’d join the campus a cappella group. And study harder, too, now we’ve learned to cherish the gift of education. But this is the real world, so instead we live out the fantasy in films.
This week’s mature student trying to roll back her maturity is Melissa McCarthy. In Life of the Party, her divorced, fortysomething mum decides to go and get the college degree she has always wanted – at the same university as her daughter. As the title suggests, this is not a remake of Educating Rita. “I want the full experience,” says McCarthy, and that means getting a youthful makeover and sampling the breadth of extracurricular life, from tripping out on weed-laced chocolate to sneaking into the frat house. Plus the occasional bit of studying.
That’s generally the way things pan out in back-to-college movies. They go in thinking it’s going to be like National Lampoon’s Animal House, and it is – only with a moral lesson thrown in at the end. Every generation has had this fantasy. In the 1960s, it was Bing Crosby playing a 51-year-old getting down with the kids in High Time. “I want the full treatment, the works,” he tells the enrolment officer. Sound familiar? After 1986’s Back to School came the original series of 21 Jump Street, in which Johnny Depp and other fresh-faced cops masqueraded as high-school students. In the 90s, Drew Barrymore did the same in Never Been Kissed, playing a frumpy but youthful-looking undercover reporter returning to slay the demons of her unhappy teenhood (in retrospect, her pupil-teacher romance raises a few ethical issues).
What is really out of date with these movies, however, are their fantasies of campus life. Today’s students are likely to have more on their minds than the venue of their next keg party. They’re juggling their studies with part-time jobs to repay their student loans. They’re protesting over the marketisation of academia, issues of inclusivity, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Campus intimacy is more a matter of negotiated consent protocols than wild abandon. And rather than their parents coming to their college, their worst nightmare is having to move back in with them after they graduate. As for adults entering higher education, they should be applauded and not stigmatised. But who wants to watch a movie about mature students acting maturely?
All of which suggests that there has never been a better time for a generation-gap college comedy, and who better than Melissa McCarthy to lead one? If it’s done well enough, we might even learn something.
Life of the Party is in UK cinemas on 11 May
