Mark Reviews Movies: OPERATION VARSITY BLUES

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 16, 2021

The real problem with the college admissions scandal was seemingly lost amidst the fame of two of its convicted perpetrators. The scam, of course, involved parents of prospective university students using a middleman to make direct payments to college officials in order to guarantee their children a spot at a prestigious university. It was bribery, plain and simple, and it also involved fraud—cheating on standardized tests and faking athletic accomplishments in order to be considered a sports candidate.

This scheme went on for years, and nobody really noticed or looked too deeply into it. Money was coming into the coffers of universities, as it has for generations, in the form of donations, and if the money was instead going directly to a coach or other official under the table, a university still stood to see the children of the rich and famous as an asset down the line. They may not have received a donation before the students' admissions, but in the years to come, surely some money would arrive.

Such activities have been going on for a long time. In Operation Varsity Blues, Rick Singer, the man who admitted to orchestrating the scam but who is still awaiting trial, points out that there are three doors for college admission. The "front door" is the standard, old-fashioned way: getting good grades, doing well on standardized tests, displaying some athletic acumen, proving community service, filling out a fine application, and all of the other long and hard work that traditionally constitutes college admission.

The "back door" consists of families making large donations—millions of dollars—to a university. Colleges will usually deny that such money affects the admissions process, but a string of mundane public figures and officials who have come from families of means and been admitted to prestigious institutions almost certainly proves otherwise. The movie offers Jared Kushner, the son of a disgraced real-estate man and son-in-law of a disgraceful real-estate guy/President, as the poster child for that way.

Singer, whose involvement in director Chris Smith's documentary is entirely indirect and accidental, came up with a "side door." It invented the appearance of the legitimate front door, while taking advantage of the spirit of the back one. The scheme was kind of ingenious, really, as so many crimes that go overlooked or ignored for years often are.

It all looked fine on paper, and Singer was, by all accounts, a good salesperson. If a parent or parents didn't know what they were doing was illegal, Singer wasn't going to be the one to tell them. It just looked like one of the old ways of doing things—a donation creating good will in the eyes of university officials. Singer just presented it as doing it on a budget, although we're still talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of these parents probably knew what they were doing was illegal, even if they wouldn't admit it.

Using talking-head interviews and re-enactments of phone transcripts from the FBI, Smith gives us a fine sense of the method and scope of this criminal enterprise. Matthew Modine plays Singer in those re-enactments, while other actors play parents and university officials on the other end of the phone conversations. In his dry and straight-to-business portrayal of the confessed mastermind (who pleaded guilty to multiple crimes on the same day the scandal was made public in 2019), Modine conveys how easily Singer gained the trust and money of a lot of people, hoping to use money to give their already-privileged kids an even greater feeling of privilege.

Smith, thankfully, isn't as enamored with the parents—especially the most famous ones—as the media was and has been since the scheme became public knowledge. The movie references Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who became the faces of the conspiracy due to their acting careers, and while it spends some time with the case of Loughlin and her husband, this documentary is more about the broader web.

Names, faces, and brief descriptions appear on screen. Actors recite the damning lines that have led to 33 parents being accused or convicted of assorted crimes in relation to the scam, but it's the scam itself—and the ease with which Singer pulled it off—that becomes the mechanism of this narrative.

It's fascinating, if a bit hollow, especially since Smith seems to be focusing on the wrong unanswerable questions that arise from this conspiracy. His goal, beyond dissecting how the scam worked, is to try to dig into Singer as a person. The filmmaker interviews a few people who worked with him under more legitimate circumstances and a woman who attempted to date him for a short period of time. They all offer the same observation: Singer was a career workaholic and an enigma of a man. One wonders why Smith thinks anyone would care about the inner life and ambitions of someone so transparently driven by money.

Lost in this mostly successful attempt to dissect the scheme and the far less successful attempt to dissect the man at its heart, though, is the real lesson we should have learned from this scandal. The legal line between a multi-million-dollar donation and a $500,000 bribe is a wide one, but Operation Varsity Blues is a bit too hesitant to analyze the much thinner ethical line between them.

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