The Freshman (1990)

Fresh or Ripe?

The Freshman is a sort of comedy drama sprinkled with self aware barbs at film analysis. It’s a great opportunity to see Marlon Brando relaxed and fully playing up the self-parody angle. Plot finds Matthew Broderick as Clark Kellog, a film student arriving in New York who through unfortunate circumstances ends up working for a man who is not too dissimilar from Don Corleone!

Writer and director Andrew Bergman spoofs the Mafia via screwball scenarios and satirical scripting, though the latter is done to death and grows tiresome at the mid-point. Penelope Anne Miller and B.D. Wong get choice support roles and deliver the goods, in fact the casting across the board is spot on, and the tech credits are firmly in the plus column.
It’s all pleasantly executed and moves along at a brisk pace, but a little less satire and more straight laced character comedy wouldn’t have gone amiss. 6/10

"The Freshman" is a very entertaining and satisfying film on every level when it could have been nothing more than a one joke, one dimensional novelity based upon the very appetising prospect not of a Komondo dragon banquet, but of watching Marlon Brando successfully reprising his Academy Award winning triumph as Don Vito Corleone purely for laughs this time around. Of course, this limited idea would have been absolutely exhausted in no time at all, so it is incredibly fortunate there is a solid story worth bothering about which is extremely well structured and enjoyably developed and humor which is especially worth relishing as Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) inexorably finds himself sinking ever deeper into a life threatening quagmire.