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Acceptable

Cinematographer-turned-director Dan Chen's documentary "Accepted" starts out to tell the story of a small, private school in rural Louisiana that attained national acclaim for their amazing success in getting their students into colleges, including Ivy League schools. By the time it's done the film, which made its debut at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, has evolved into an examination of the differences between how wealthy people get into college versus how non-wealthy accomplish the same goal. Not surprisingly, race plays a role in the process.

The school was TM Landry Prep, located near Lafayette, LA. Now closed, Landry Prep had boasted a 100 percent college acceptance rate for its underprivileged high school students, almost none of whom were white. This near-impossible feat was achieved by the students doing whatever founder and leader Mike Landry told them to do. For most of the documentary Landry seems to be a latter-day Joe Clark, the onetime principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, NJ and inspiration for the popular film, "Lean on Me."

For a good chunk of the film we marvel at what Landry has done, and wonder why this can't be a blueprint for how all children should be educated. But the rug gets pulled out from under Landry, and the film's viewers, when the New York Times publishes an investigative piece on how the school operates behind the scenes. I won't tell you the details here, because then there would be no point in seeing the film.

Director Dan Chen has the right approach to the story for most of the film, but then he tries to shoehorn it into a bigger statement about how corrupt the college enrollment process is. That's a topic that could be better addressed in a whole separate film; there is more than enough story for this documentary in just the examination of the TM Landry School. "Accepted" is still worth a watch, but I thought by trying to make a larger statement, Chen diluted his own product.