If only life after college were as easy as it’s depicted in Post Grad, a listless comedy starring Alexis Bledel as a recent college graduate trying to find her place in the world. Whiny though she is, Bledel’s Ryden Malby has a great job right around the corner, two attractive men vying for her attention and a supportive family who just want her to be happy. So why’s she such a downer?

The Details

Post Grad

Alexis Bledel, Zach Gilford, Michael Keaton, Rodrigo Santoro.

Directed by Vicky Jenson

Rated PG-13

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Post Grad

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Post Grad never really explores Ryden’s inner life, and that’s its biggest fault; there’s no sense of why Ryden wants her dream job at a publishing house, or why she resists (and then succumbs to) the charms of her smitten longtime best friend Adam (Gilford), or why she pursues (and then drops) a dalliance with her hunky older next-door neighbor (Santoro). Instead, the movie spends far too much time on subplots that go nowhere, climaxing for some reason not in a revelatory moment for Ryden, but in a drawn-out boxcar race for her annoying little brother, mentioned once at the beginning of the movie and then suddenly trotted out an hour later as some hugely important event.

That kind of disjointed lurching from one thing to another pervades the movie, and it doesn’t help that the characters speak almost entirely in platitudes (it’s especially sad for Bledel to be saddled with such bland dialogue after her years on Gilmore Girls). The uncertainty of post-college life is a potential gold mine of interesting material, and this movie avoids nearly all of it.