Set in 1984 in an America that stomps on the impoverished, the non-white and the non-straight, The Preppie Connection promises an enthralling, pathos-laden tale of a child who grew up poor in one of the richest parts of the country—New Haven, Connecticut. The film’s opening shot sets up its premise: in a voiceover, Tobias Harris (Thomas Mann) introduces himself as a scholarship winner to a prestigious boarding school. As Toby says this, we see the young scholar at an airport, a bag of Colombian cocaine under his left arm, his crush Alex Hayes (Lucy Fry) just ahead. This is a thriller of the poor boy who strikes it rich and gets laid. Unfortunately, the film delivers no thrills, no heart and little socioeconomic commentary.
Toby does get laid, though. Exacerbating the film’s failure to deliver on its narrative promise, The Preppie Connection features a cast of rich, white straight people in New England. What are such people supposed to teach us about the struggle for justice in the face of a Reagan-era refusal to address it?
Even worse, the non-white people in this film are caricatures: a pragmatic Colombian drug kingpin, tough-guy cartel enforcers and New Haven-area blacks who sell weed on street corners. Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was able to get away with similarly empty characterizations because of its visual genius, but this film has no such merits, its cinematography as inconsequential as its other components.
Perhaps worst of all, co-writer-director Joseph Castelo has the nerve to justify his film by having Toby pontificate about white privilege in a film that is wholly dependent upon white privilege and juvenile racial coding. Look at how the film treats violence: while this is an unusually nonviolent portrayal of drug trafficking, the violence at hand is committed by people of color. When a white girl commits suicide, we are supposed to be sad; when a Latina one is in the frame, we are supposed to be aroused. Castelo utilizes the lexicon of white privilege to explain why Toby goes to prison while his rich classmates go unpunished. But since Toby is white, Castelo inexcusably calls into question the very existence of white privilege, shifting the lens to class rather than race.
The film’s commentary on neoliberalism fares slightly better but is still problematic. Viewers are repeatedly told that Toby is poor but are never shown it. He’s not rich, as he’s careful not to remove the tags from his “preppie” clothing, but he’s not poor, though his classmates’ affluenza makes him seem so. Economics teacher Mr. Jennings (Sam Page) links this more directly to Reaganomics, his discussions of classic economists juxtaposed with Toby peddling cocaine at runaway profits. There is a shade of social critique here: the ‘80s profit-driven capitalist ethos is most strongly embodied by the illicit trade of narcotics. But this is not an original idea, nor is it well argued.
Castelo’s previous film, The War Within (2005), had a similar imbalance between sociopolitical ambition and execution, but it offered a compelling narrative with legitimate thrills, pathos and character arcs — if not commentary. But his latest lacks even believable characters. While Toby and Mr. Jennings behave absurdly at times, the most egregious is Toby’s mother Ingrid (Amy Hargreaves), who careens wildly from intelligent to overbearing to just plain moronic as the narrative demands.
The Preppie Connection presents a familiar, bland story with grand ineptitude, and gestures half-heartedly at neoliberalism’s problems. It tries to be an indictment of white privilege, but is in fact its epitome.