Delayed Reaction: Try Harder!

Premise: A documentary about a prestigious San Francisco high school and the cut throat business of college admissions.

 

My big takeaway from this movie is that I sure am glad I don't have to go through the college admissions process again. I did it 16 years ago and at a magnitude of difficulty lower than the kids in this movie. I remember using "no essay" as a factor to filter down the schools I applied to, for example. Even still, it was daunting at the time. The helplessness. The mystery. And at that age, we have such grandiose ideas about what it all means. I also went to a competitive high school, but again, not as crazy as Lowell High School, which this documentary follows. I remember being concerned about my class ranking and all that. Test scores. Being in National Honors society. I was a fringe smart kid at best, but I recognized enough in this movie for some war flashbacks.

 

While Try Harder! is technically about this school and a selection of the students, the focus is on college admissions. This movie does a great job covering all the aspects of that process for the students. It's hard to conceptualize a 4% admissions rate until you see what some of the kids they're turning down look like. These are kids with excellent grades and test scores. They have parents who are highly involved. They collect extracurricular activities and charity opportunities like merit badges (Oh, they are Scouts too). Still, that's not enough for a lot of schools.

 

I do have some "where's the poop?" suspicions about the movie though. A lot of the ways that it presents things don't feel right. Like there's some exaggeration going on. It paints Lowell as a school of geniuses, and I suspect that it's not quite as extreme as they make it sound. Surely there are kids not taking AP classes who are going to schools lower down the UC chain and are happy about it. It would've been nice to see one of them. This movie also weirdly makes these kids seem less successful than they are. The one girl only gets into two Ivy league schools and that's a deflating moment. There's a disconnect in the movie there. I wish the movie could've found a way to focus even more on the randomness of admissions rather than the kids not being good enough. It's a good movie, but it felt like the filmmakers went in thinking "Let's make a movie about how difficult college admissions are" as opposed to "Let's take a look at what college admissions are like at a prestigious high school".

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend