As its title indicates, Post Grad is a portrait of life after college graduation. Since it takes place in the same economy in which we are currently living, it is about the harsh realization that all your dreams and plans of success simply aren’t going to come to fruition the moment you are ready. But as you might guess, through the help of her quirky family, a wise and handsome neighbor, and a caring man who loves her, recent college graduate Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) finds that in the search for happiness and value, there are often a few more things to consider than what’s on your resume. At times, her journey is cute and funny, ridiculous and relatable, and both painfully realistic and inspirationally hopeful. But trading much of its quirk for stereotype, lending most of its characters a slightly more carefree spirit than most actual job-seekers, and leaning on turns of plot and a timeline that simply are not realistic for even the most ambitious and optimist of college graduates, in the end, it is a film that’s inspiration is one that must be taken with the cup and half of artificial dyes and sweeteners with which it is made.
That said, in Ryden’s journey from confident to confused to hopefully expectant are a still a few messages about seeking and finding lives of value and meaning that still offer something to those of us living in a world that doesn’t always resolve our every problem in two hours or less. Like many movies of its kind, Post Grad’s story speaks to the value of relationships, the worth of not selling out, and the complex journeys that we must almost always travel to get anywhere. But the message that stands out the most is that of plans diverted and the truth that sometimes that is the only way we will actually find what it is we seek.
As Ryden tells us in a video blog on the morning of her college graduation, ever since she was a little girl, she has had a plan for her life: 1) Get good grades, 2) Get a college scholarship, 3) Get good grades, and 4) Get a job at Happerman & Browning (the preeminent publishing house in Los Angeles). With one, two, and three checked off, all she has left is four. As she tells her interviewer when she asks Ryden why she wants to work at Happerman & Browning, it’s pretty much all she lives for. “Books are all I know and everything I love,” says Ryden. “I want this job because I can’t imagine ever doing anything else.” And so she demonstrates in her complete ignorance and/or disinterest in the love offered her by her best friend Adam (Zach Gilford) and her absolute confusion and lack of value when her life suddenly fails to follow her lifelong plan.
As Ryden’s father (Michael Keaton) tells her, “the world’s a scary place; it doesn’t play by the rules,” and for many of us who have found ourselves without everything from the jobs, the family, or the means we always thought would simply be a given once we reached a certain age or gained a certain amount of experience, that is exactly how it feels. But looking at Ryden’s story as well as the real life stories of many individuals from both the present and the past, the truth is that sometimes the failure of our life to follow the plans we have for it isn’t due to unfair turns of events or unfortunate circumstances, it is simply because our plans for our lives aren’t the ones we are meant to be living.
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