Mark Reviews Movies: ACCEPTED (2022)

Accepted, Greewich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 30, 2022

Everybody loves an inspiring story. That's clearly what drew director Dan Chen to T. M. Landry, a small school in rural Louisiana that gained national attention for viral videos of their high school seniors being accepted into prestigious universities. Accepted begins as a behind-the-scenes look at the school, its founder, and a group of students, with Chen clearly open to and curious about the unconventional methods that have resulted in such success. At a certain point, though, reality comes crashing down, and everyone, including Chen, has to confront the truth, some potential lies, and what both the truth and the lies have to say about the state of higher education in the United States.

That's a tall order for this film, which obviously began with no awareness of what controversies and questions would result from what seems like a simple, straightforward, and inspirational tale of one man's efforts to change the lives of as many kids as he can. The man is Mike Landry, the founder of the school that shares his name.

Along with a quartet of high school juniors at the college preparatory school, Chen interviews Landry, follows him at work, and stops by his home, where the work doesn't stop, apparently. Late in the night, a couple of his students call with questions about a math problem, and Landry stops everything, talks them through the formulas, and offers words of encouragement that some Ivy League college is in their grasp.

That's the philosophy of the school, which has no set class schedule or hours of operation. That means students can learn—and even teach the younger students—as they see fit, but it also means they're arriving early, leaving late, and sometimes being away from home for 12 hours a day for as many days of the week as they believe they need. One student talks about enjoying her one day off during a particularly intensive week, and if that seems like a problem with the school, that's not even on the radar when things come crashing down around it.

Landry doesn't have a background in education, but he's not exactly a teacher (His wife Tracey is an educator, and in retrospect, it does seem a bit odd that neither she nor any other faculty member offers any explanation of methods, syllabi, or anything else in regards to, you know, actual learning). He's more akin to a motivational speaker, offering positive words and rousing speeches in the morning and throughout the day.

Some cracks appear in those speeches, such as when Landry picks out three Black teenagers (The school's population is predominantly African American), essentially telling them that they would be dead or in prison without this school, or when the founder divides the class between those who have met his expectations on a practice standardized test and those who have not. Toward the latter group, Landry starts scolding, yelling, and swearing, bringing one student to tears. That doesn't stop him.

The man has some self-evident anger issues, but Landry merely writes them off as being passionate about his students' futures. Whether or not Chen believes him is irrelevant, and while that points to the filmmaker's hands-off and objective approach, it also becomes an issue when Landry becomes paranoid about who might and might not believe him in other matters.

As for those four students, they have all transferred to T.M. Landry for the school year in which the first half of the documentary is set. Alicia has a bookshelf filled with tomes that display her vast, diverse interests over the years—from the Twilight and Harry Potter series to treatises on sociology, which is what she wants to study in college, and The Communist Manifesto. Adia is an orphan, being raised by a grandmother and an uncle, with interest in the arts, and Cathy helps take care of a household with a widowed mother and two sisters with developmental disabilities. Finally, there's Isaac, whose father and grandfather worked in the oil fields of his home state, and when his older brother was accepted into a high-status university after attending T.M. Landry, Isaac saw opportunity for his own future for the first time in his life.

Apart from the more apparent cracks (Landry's personality problems, the school's unclear policy, the obvious pressures being faced by these kids), we more or less have to believe that Landry's process, as contradictory as it is in being both extremely tough and seemingly unstructured, is working. Those videos of students celebrating being accepted into college, surrounded by their cheering classmates, go viral. Landry starts loving the attention, being interviewed by news and talks shows, and having reporters come to the school.

One of those reporters is with the New York Times. With a bit more digging than some feel-good human interest story, an article in that paper reveals accusations of falsifying transcripts and even physical abuse. Those four students find themselves with a big decision to make, and Chen has to adjust his approach and his entire thesis to match the various complications and questions that arise from the controversy.

Again, it's a lot for this film, but Chen is up to the task. That's mainly because he has access to those four students, who have distinct perspectives about those accusations and what their shared choice means for their lives individually. In Accepted, he also takes the time to explore how much this school, its accomplishments (even if they're not entirely achieved by honest means—especially when a bunch of wealthy people pay their way for their own kids to get into college), and the hope it represents in its existence mean to students and parents. There are no easy answers here, but Chen ensures that we start asking the right questions from multiple sides of this case.

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