Cedar Rapids

Cedar Rapids is a genial, sweet, and ultimately lightweight comedy that produces a lot of smiles, a few belly laughs, and a lot of good will. It doesn't aim very high, though, and I find the slow rollout strategy a strange one. Maybe because it was at Sundance people will think this is an art film. It's not.

The film is the adventure of Tim Lippe, played by Ed Helms. He's an insurance agent for a very small firm in a small town in Wisconsin. After the death of the firm's hot-shot agent by auto-asphyxiation (the go-to cause of death when a film needs to be morbidly funny) Helms is tapped to represent the firm at a convention in the titular Iowa city. His boss, the always great Stephen Root, pressures him to win a valuable industry award, and tells him to suck up to the association president, Kurtwood Smith.

What follows, directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Phil Johnston, seems predictable but has some pleasant surprises. Helms is the classic fish out of water, in that he's never taken a plane before, and appears to have been raised like a veal, never being exposed to anything worldly. He has a sexual relationship with his old grammar school teacher (Sigourney Weaver) though she's having a fling but he thinks it's true love. Helms plays the kind of guy who falls in love easily, as over the course of the brief time period of the film he will declare undying love to two more women.

Getting over the hurdle of buying Helms' character takes some doing. There's a Beverly Hillbillies quality to it--he's impressed by the hotel pool ("it's like Barbados here!" he exclaims), and has a momentary lapse of decorum when confronted by his black roommate, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. ("there's an Afro American in my room!"). In some ways, you have to accept the world that Cedar Rapids creates as much as any sci-fi space opera.

Helms quickly falls in with Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), the brash, vulgar, hard-drinking salesman. He also meets Joan Ostroski-Fox (Anne Heche), dubbed O-Fox, a married woman who declares, unironically, that everything that happens in Cedar Rapids stays in Cedar Rapids. Whitlock, once Helms shock over his skin color abates, turns out to be a nerdy guy who has a fondness for acronyms like NTS (not too shabby) and the HBO program The Wire, which will turn out to be handy later on (I checked, and what I suspected is true--this is an inside gag, Whitlock had a role on that show).

So where does the surprise come in? You might think that this film ends up mocking the Midwestern naivete and blandness of its characters. I mean, we start with the title--Cedar Rapids, which I'm sure is a nice place but is no Las Vegas. I was sure I'd be in for an evening of condescending, withering comments about middle America. But no, the director and writer actually have a fondness for their characters and their values, at least the four at the core of the piece.

I noted in the closing credits that Alexander Payne was one of the executive producers, and I thought about his films while watching Cedar Rapids. Payne has made two of my favorite films of the last fifteen years, Election and Sideways, but I can't say that he has affection for his characters. At times he torments them. Arteta and Johnston pull back. Just when you think they're going to get mean they let their characters have a small triumph, and ultimately be heroic.

I think this is best exemplified in the role Reilly plays. We think he's going to be the typical asshole, but I was astonished at how Reilly, in a very smart performance, turns him into something else. His funniest bits aren't the crude jokes or boorish behavior (although seeing him in a swimming pool with the top of a garbage can on his head is pretty funny) but instead they are the small moments, such as his reaction to Helms singing an insurance-themed Christmas carol.

As pleasant an experience this film is, it didn't shake me to my core. Though it's not as caustic as Payne's films, it's also not as ambitious. The conflict is wrapped up in a pretty pat way (there is no surprise that Smith's character is a religious hypocrite). The subplot involving a prostitute (Alia Shawkat) is kind of odd. Do girls really hang out right in front of Iowa hotels and ply their trade in the open? The script seems to realize it's offering another Pretty Woman-like caricature of prostitution, and then tries to double back to prove that it's being serious about the subject, and the whole thing misfires. I did laugh when she offers Helms an opportunity to try a particular sex practice, and he earnestly replies, "I've heard about that."

Interesting note: the film's final scene, which has offers a very well-executed last line by both writer and actor, is included in the film's trailer. This is like including the "Nobody's perfect" line in a trailer for Some Like It Hot. Marketing people can be so stupid.

My grade for Cedar Rapids: B