A dutiful crime documentary that raises few hackles, “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal,” doesn’t waste breath on moralistic huffing and puffing about what a certain group of rich parents did to get their children into exclusive colleges. It also, delightfully, expends precious little screen time on the celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, whose faces and names featured in nearly all news stories about this story when it broke in early 2019. Given the tabloid gotcha giddiness that characterized most of that coverage, what director Chris Smith does is almost radical: Sticking mostly to the crime itself, the accused ringleader behind it, Rick Singer, and the systemic corruption he exploited.
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In an increasingly common gimmick used pretty seamlessly here, Smith builds the documentary around recreations. Given the depth of seemingly incriminating recorded phone calls between Singer and his clients, this provides the film with a wealth of material to dramatize. Smith interleaves those dramatizations with contextual commentary from a wide assortment of people in the know, from test preparation experts, ex-college admissions officials, and former clients of Singer’s. More than one of them describes the service he marketed—using a battery of well-targeted and pricey fakery and bribery to ensure admission for just about any high school senior whose parents could rustle up a few hundred thousand dollars—as sleazy. But the idea that law enforcement could intrude on such a cozy relationship amongst high-net-worth individuals seems to have been unfathomable until it wasn’t.
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A basketball coach who reinvented himself as an independent college admissions consultant after being fired in the 1990s, Singer marketed himself to anxious parents as the sure-fire way to deliver the brass ring of elite college admission to their children. By many accounts, a workaholic and serial fabulist with a hunter’s sense of his prey’s vulnerabilities, Singer is shown here as a master of a game which vanishingly few people know how to play. Casting Matthew Modine makes a kind of sense, given how his lean presence and habitual clenched-jaw tension lines up with Singer’s monomania for machine-like exercise and deal-hunting. But as effective as the characterization is, Modine is no charmer. That leaves the movie with a credibility gap while watching him schmooze one client after another into his risky enterprise.
One of the more striking aspects of “Operation Varsity Blues” is how easily Singer’s clients pushed past the amoral aspects of his proposal. None of the recorded conversations acted out here between Singer and the one-percenters seeking his services veer into right and wrong. As one expert sardonically notes, Singer’s ultra-wealthy clients just wrangled their children’s college admission the same way they handled everything else: “Apply money to the problem.” A couple wonders whether anything will blowback on them, but for the most part, illegally obtaining an unfair advantage for their progeny does not seem to worry the Davos set as acted in this movie. If they have any qualms, Singer’s well-targeted justification (“the playing field’s not fair”) and anodyne formulation (calling his cheat a mere “side door” to getting into college, rather than the “back door” of larger donations or “front door” of merit) helps get them past it. “What a world we live in,” marvels one client after Singer describes creating an entirely fake record of high school athleticism to burnish the application process, as though he was simply a passive observer to the deception. Then again, Singer’s clientele also includes a man who invites him to a birthday bash in Paris for which “I rented out Versailles,” so bourgeois moral qualms are unlikely to be a factor.
“Operation Varsity Blues” is most engaging the further it gets from Singer’s alleged conspiracy. Smith understands how the match of colleges’ hunger for donations and upper-tier parents’ demand for upper-tier college berths helps even the baldest lies slide past unnoticed. Nobody sees what they do not want to see. There is some interest in hearing how easy it was for Singer to fake test scores (have the parents find a doctor to claim their child has a learning disorder and needs extra time, then pay off the proctor to fill in the answers). But the movie hits richer material once it gets into the pressures that provided Singer with so many takers for his services.
At a few points, “Operation Varsity Blues” pivots from the conspiracy itself and the FBI investigation, which ultimately charged dozens to talking about what drives wealthy parents to bend the rules for their offspring. Exasperated experts lay out the insane inequities of this world. Donating a few million dollars to smooth the way for an academically underachieving child—the example is used of lackluster student Jared Kushner skating into Harvard after his father donated $2.5 million, while only affirmative action students of color are questioned on the merits of their admittance—is never acknowledged but widely known to be true. We see social media clips of students exploding in joy or collapsing in despair after discovering their application status. “Forget about USC!” one expert shouts in exasperation about this status mania which the movie argues has nothing to do with academic excellence. But while “Operation Varsity Blues” digs a little into the deeper systemic rot in the admissions process, this is ultimately a story of a personality. Just not a terribly interesting one.
Smith’s focus on Singer is no surprise. His better documentaries, like “Collapse” and “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,” have been about a great many things (the meaning of life, the end of America) but pivoted on the magnetic people at their core. While “Fyre” reveled in a certain kind of finger-pointing social media schadenfreude, it clicked as a movie due to the hilariously blind self-belief of festival organizer and serial con man Billy McFarland. Singer is a far more distant and unknowable kind of character. Smith tries to dig into the human side of the crime with his interviews with John Vandemoer, the Stanford sailing coach who is just about the only accomplice to go on the record here. But Vandemoer comes across less as scheming criminal looking to supplement his salary by giving fake sailors a spot at a top university than a coach pressured to bring in funding who was all too happy when a friendly salesman like Singer offered to make “donations” to the school.
The true drama in the admissions scandal is not the ringleader or the celebrities and hedge-fund magnates who hired him but what this Hunger Games scenario means for all the children whose parents cannot afford his services. [B]
