This post contains all the spoilers and discusses the movie with the assumption that you've seen it. You can watch the trailer at the bottom of this post.

The Credits

The Freshman is a comedy directed by Anrew Bergman and starring Matthew Broderick, Marlon Brando, Bruno Kirby, Penelope Ann Miller and Paul Benedict.

The Plot

Clark Kellogg is an NYU film student who moves to NYC from Vermont. His stepfather is an animal rights activists who shoots at hunters to scare them away. As soon as Clark arrives off the bus in NYC, he is scammed by Victor Ray (Kirby), a car service operator who steals all his luggage and money. Arriving at school, his professor (Benedict) is unsympathetic. Clark needs $700 to buy books, mostly ones written by the professor. He finds Victor but is offered a job instead of getting his money back. Victor's uncle Carmine (Brando), who bears a striking similarity to Brando's character in The Godfather, offers Clark a job delivering a package twice a week in New Jersey for $500 each trip. His first job is to deliver a Komodo dragon, an endangered lizard species. When Clark's stepfather finds out about this, he calls the Department of Justice, who start tracking Clark and Carmine. This all leads to a $350,000 a plate dinner where guests pay for the luxury of eating an endangered species, this year starring the Komodo dragon that Clark delivered. When the DOJ raids the dinner, Carmine takes Clark hostage leading Clark to believe he accidentally shoots Carmine in the melee. The DOJ agents are corrupt and working for another crime family. Carmine is not dead. He just need the DOJ agents to believe this so they would steal the money from the dinner and get busted by the FBI. It turns out it was all a setup from the very beginning when Victor Ray offered Clark a ride from the bus station.

Thoughts on the Film

This film would be nothing but a ridiculous farce if not for the key plot line that Clark is an aspiring filmmaker who just arrived at film school. Like any student he arrives with grand ideas for all the films he will make someday. But on arrival he deals with the drudgery of school. His professor demands students spend hundreds of dollars on the books he wrote. His classes consist of endless viewings of The Godfather Part 2. The professor appears to have memorized all of the lines in the movie. His life becomes like a fantasy life, like a second rate crime movie that only a freshman film student would dream up after being forced to take classes consisting of nothing but a Godfather film.

This is not to say that it's literally a dream, but with the narration it comes off as a fantastical story that Clark Kellogg might dream up for a film project. That said, approaching films as if they are nothing but a dream is a good way to make sense of films. I don't mean that it's the character's dream, but rather the director putting a dream to film and hence letting the viewer see a dream come to life. Dream logic makes more sense than trying to rationalize illogical plots with how things work in real life. And in this film, it works as great comedy, as the events get more absurd, then end with the twist that it was all planned from the beginining.

This film obviously would never have worked if they had not been able to get Marlon Brando for the role. Within the film, it is acknowledged that he strongly resembles Marlon Brando's role as Don Corleone in the Godfather. He plays a bit of a parody of the New York City mafia boss. Clark meets him at a restaurant that hangs a picture of Mussolini. When Clark asks if that is a painting of Il Duce, Carmine responds, "well it ain't Tony Bennett." A running joke through the movie is that Carmine and Victor keep stating that Clark is from a different state (Kansas, Montana, etc.) each time, never getting it right that he is from Vermont. It plays on this NYC stereotype that New Yorkers see anything beyond New Jersey, Long Island and immediate Upstate New York as being all the same.

The professor plays the second Godfather movie in seemingly every classroom segment. Notably, this is not the one featuring Marlon Brando as Robert De Niro played a young version of him in part 2. Everything about Clark's story seems to be told to impress the professor, who seems to hold him in low regard. Eventually Carmine's daughter shows up class. The professor is not only a fan of the Godather movies, but knows who Carmine is. He is quite impressed that Clark knows him.

Brando was early in parodying the mafia role he was known for. The younger Don Corleone, Robert De Niro, would follow 9 years later with the comedy Analyze This, about a mob boss seeking psychotherapy. Perhaps neither is well known anymore, but this seems a little more clever, even though the latter sent De Niro into a series of comedic roles.

Watch this as a straight story if you want. It's absurd that anything like this could happen to someone. It makes a good story if told from the perspective of a film student.

This trailer is the property of Columbia Pictures.