A middle class family from Delaware (Neil Patrick Harris, Bonnie Somerville) moves to Manhattan, hoping to enroll their daughter in a good kindergarten. But in The Best and the Brightest, they soon enough encounter the legendary world of private elite schools preparing the children of the ruling class for lives of privilege from the earliest age. Hiring a consultant helps them through the door, but complications spin into greater complications in this smart, funny satire of the velvet-lined rumpus rooms of the Ivy League as well the American class system sustaining it, with its pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-artistic pretense and the transparent hypocrisy of the super rich. Directed by Josh Shelov, The Best and the Brightest is out on DVD.
