Are some real-life farces too perfectly stupid to accommodate an onscreen take-off? The Best and the Brightest, set in the self-satirizing world of pre-school placement in New York City depicted in the 2009 documentary Nursery University, is a farce that can't quite find its comic register. First-time writer (with Michael Jaeger) and director Josh Shelov's story of a young couple struggling to get their 5-year-old daughter into a private Manhattan kindergarten offers several different tonal possibilities, and Shelov's mix-and-match approach highlights the improbable difficulty of making sport of something too silly for words.
The set-up is classic light dramedy: Even before Samantha (Bonnie Somerville) and Jeff (Neil Patrick Harris) crack the door of their new Manhattan apartment, the snide comments of two passing women make it clear they're not in Delaware anymore. Having come into some money, they decided (well, Samantha decided) to take "one last shot at the dream" in New York. What that dream is seems abstract to Samantha, a former cheerleading captain and stay-at-home mom, and it's totally lost on Jeff, a coding drone who would have been perfectly happy settling into a comfortable, uncompetitive Delaware life. What the dream did not entail was any sense of the schooling options for a kid in the city, and Samantha is quickly slapped with a double-dose of sticker shock. Set on the private school option for reasons -- one of a host of dangling details -- that are left unclear and incongruous, Samantha hires a pugnacious but tender-hearted consultant named Sue Lemon (Amy Sedaris, as Letterman says: always delightful). Cheery strings and "snappy" dialogue seem to signal a mildly diverting ride with excellent company.
During their consultation Samantha confides that Jeff was her second choice of husband, and that the power balance has always tilted in her favor; instead of living up to his high school potential and becoming, say, a famous writer, Jeff became an office-bound obscurity. Sue Lemon is equally (and very amusingly) bored by Jeff, and rechristens him a poet on their preschool applications, because "no knows the difference between good poetry and bad poetry anymore."
This is essentially the plotline, and it drags the trio through the nosebleed section of Manhattan, where the pretentious and the debauched (most are both) fall for Jeff's routine hook, line and smiley face. The first to do so is headmistress Katherine (Jenna Stern), who stops just short of checking parents' gums to establish their pedigree but can't distinguish between actual poetry and the filthy IM transcripts that were accidentally slipped into Jeff and Samantha's file. The transcripts belong to Jeff's friend Clark (Peter Serafinowicz), another rich Manhattan degenerate with a taste for hookers and an enamel-eroding vocabulary. Getting the last available spot means keeping up the charade until the preschool's entire board is satisfied that the couple are their kind of people.
The Best and the Brightest takes a swift turn for the vulgar when that board (including the acid combination of Christopher McDonald and Kate Mulgrew, with John Hodgman playing the repressed aesthete to the hilt) arrives on the scene. Plutocrats with no clothes and no class, they deepen Jeff's predicament by accepting him into the fold. The tiny seed of discontent between Jeff and Samantha is sown for what resolution it's worth, which is not much, and despite two genial performances, their characters remain completely inscrutable. The goof on New York's awful elite only gets grimmer and less viable as the film goes on. For the most part Shelov goes for shock value instead of social satire, missing the window in between where Alexander Payne has planted his black flags. But then Payne would probably shy away from such a broad and uncomplicated target; I imagine he'd feel Shelov's pain in trying to get this unwieldy send-up off the ground.