Cedar Rapids is being billed as a Hangover-style good-guys-gone-bad raunchfest, but this unexpected charmer owes as much to comedies of ordinary Middle-American angst like Fargo and About Schmidt (the latter directed by Alexander Payne, who helped produce this one) as it does to the broad, profane epics of Todd Phillips and Judd Apatow. That is to say: Yes, it is a Hangover-style good-guys-gone-bad raunchfest, but there’s also a very human glow at its core that fights against the inherent cynicism of its genre.
It helps that Ed Helms, the former Daily Show correspondent who provided the sole moral center of The Hangover, now takes center stage as Tim Lippe, a likably incompetent small-town Wisconsin insurance agent and naïf. Under comically grotesque circumstances, he winds up headed to an insurance convention in the titular Iowa city, which looms in his mind as a combination of Pleasure Island and Gomorrah.
There, he rooms with flamboyant horndog Deanzie (John C. Reilly, who appears to have perfectly synthesized a hybrid of Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn) and the low-key Ronald (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.). The three are joined on their inevitable adventures by convention vet and party girl — make that party woman — Anne Heche, as Cedar Rapids, perhaps needless to say, begins to live up to its reputation as a carnal wonderland.
That all-purpose symbol of paid liberation for the American working male, the out-of-town business convention, has played a significant role in lots of films — think Intolerable Cruelty or Up in the Air or The Big Kahuna – and here too there’s plenty of fun to be had at its expense. But if this type of comedy often plays out as a subtle cautionary tale — a long day’s journey into the debauched night — Cedar Rapids seems to accept that sometimes you have to let loose. Even as the buttoned-down milieu predictably gives way to drunken chaos, the snark is kept to a minimum.
Credit that partly to director Miguel Arteta, whose work across a variety of comic styles has often turned on finding something very delicate and honest within the humdrum confines of ordinary American life. (Last year’s underseen Youth in Revolt may have been marketed as a teen hipster comedy, but it was more about the teen fantasy of hipsterdom than its actualization — a far more universal and realistic condition.) For some, Cedar Rapids may not add up to all that much, especially since Arteta once came to us trailing clouds of Sundance glory. (I can imagine the executives pitching: “It’s The Hangover, with heart.”) But he manages to give us genuine laughs without making us feel like we need a shower afterwards, and that certainly counts for something.
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