Larry Crowne Blu-ray Review
Is 'Larry Crowne' friend or faux?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 10, 2011
Tom Hanks is perhaps the most unlikely superstar of contemporary cinema. Rumpled, almost deliberately anti-
glamorous, given to a usually low key performance style that doesn't overtly call attention to itself, Hanks' career seems
even more improbable when one remembers that his first role of relatively major note (after a couple of fairly
forgettable cameos or roles in throwaway projects) was that of a cross-dressing advertising guy in the short-lived
sitcom
Bosom Buddies. But people saw something in Hanks, something that was oddly reminiscent of a bygone
age, where equally unlikely leading men like Jimmy Stewart rose to the head of the pack against equally formidable
odds. Hanks attracted the attention of several up and comers back in the early eighties, chief among them Ron Howard
after Hanks guest starred on an episode of
Happy Days. And with the surprise smash success of Howard's
fantasy
Splash, Hanks' big screen career was on solid footing, leaving his
Bosom Buddies co-star Peter
Scolari in the dust of some kind of
Trivial Pursuit alternate universe. Hanks of course consolidated his stature
and prestige with any number of iconic roles, bringing home Oscars and Emmys along the way, but like any actor worth
his salt, all he
really wanted to do was direct. Hanks finally got his chance in the underappreciated
That
Thing You Do!, a fond kind of post-
Happy Days look at a one-hit wonder band in the early sixties. You might
almost think you'd wandered back into
That Thing You Do! as Hanks' latest directorial (and starring)
achievement
Larry Crowne starts up, as it sports a somewhat similar title design and gets started to some
rollicking rock by Jeff Lynne as it establishes the titular character, played by Hanks, as a do-gooder, all around
Everyman who works at U-mart, a red-shirted stand-in for Target. Following in what almost become a genre unto itself
in this recession weary era of economic downturn, Larry, like characters in everything from
The Company Men to
Everything Must Go, finds out he's been downsized, due not to any issue with his work performance, but due to
the fact that he never had a college education, making his climb up the U-Mart corporate ladder all but impossible.
Despite Larry's semi-desperate pleas that the company recognize he did twenty years in the Navy right out of high
school, they let him go, and his world is turned upside down, albeit briefly, until he decides to get that college degree
courtesy of his local community college.
Larry Crowne is a patently odd project for Hanks to direct. It's genial but slight, and it plays more like a made
for
television film than a major feature pairing Hanks with another superstar, Julia Roberts, who plays the snarky Speech
teacher Mercy (for Mercedes) Tainot who ends up changing Larry's life, and not just through coursework, if you catch my
drift.
The screenplay by Hanks and
My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos is like an outline, drawn in broad strokes
and with no real narrative flow, lackluster drama and only a few slight smiles along the way, certainly no outright
guffaws.
Is
Larry Crowne supposed to be a heartfelt drama of a middle aged man having to reclaim his life after an
unexpected career letdown? Is it a more traditional romantic comedy bringing two disparate misfits together in a match
made in, well, community college? The problem with
Larry Crowne is it's neither one nor the other, and when it
does attempt to dabble in either of those genres, it does so tentatively, without any real commitment.
The problems with
Larry Crowne occur virtually right off the bat, with the scene where Larry is fired. Hanks
plays the scene like an
American Tragedy, a heart tugging moment of a guy who sees his midlife shattered by an insane decision by a
corporate entity that has a
rulebook that doesn't make any sense. The three people corporate types sitting down with Larry, however, including
The Daily
Show's Rob Riggle, play the scene like it's a
Saturday Night Live skit, with non sequiturs galore and one of
those
faux
arch approaches that is supposed to be hilarious but rarely is (and it isn't here). That same tonal ambiguity plagues
Larry Crowne
for the rest of its relatively brief running time. This is a film that wants to exude quirkiness, but quirk is not a potent
substitute for plot or
character.
The issues with the film's tonality continue just as soon as Larry's fired, for instead of giving us some emotional insight
into the character, we get a montage worthy of a 1950s Douglas Sirk potboiler as Larry attempts to find a new job, and
then magically through the recommendation of his Lottery winning neighbor (played by Cedric the Entertainer), Larry
decides to go back to school. Within literally minutes, he's befriended by a quirky young girl, Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw),
who, seeing Larry arrive on a little mini-scooter (a "vehicle" he's purchased from Cedric's constant garage sale), invites
Larry into a "gang" of college kids who
all own similar scooters. Yeah, right. Quirkiness is okay as far as it
goes, but this is just pure silliness and something that seeks to create some false sense of community built around a
particularly odd element. Wilmer Valderrama (
That 70s Show) is also on hand as Talia's
faux-jealous
boyfriend. (There's an awful lot of
faux in
Larry Crowne, one of the film's most peculiar proclivities). Sulu himself, George
Takei, also shows up in a semi-cameo as another professor Crowne has, though Takei's presence seems to have been predicated on his
"mad laugh" which was part of those odd commercials for a television brand he did last year.
The other putative main character here is Roberts' unhappy teacher Mercy. Mercy is in a devolving marriage with a porn
addicted internet entrepreneur (played by Bryan Cranston), or at least that's what we're meant to glean from the
absolutely minimal information we're given about these two. Roberts sulks around this film like she's been forced to
show up on set and suck lemons to earn what was probably a rather magnificent paycheck. When she does get a
moment or two of her trademark ebullience, it seems completely out of character with the rest of the film, forced and
unnatural and, well, just plain
faux, like so much else in
Larry Crowne. The whole issue of Crowne needing to attend school
to reinvigorate his career is completely mitigated about halfway through the film in any case, when a longtime buddy of his hires him on ths
spot. So what was that first forty five minutes all about, anyway?
One of the oddest and
faux-est (to coin a word) things about
Larry Crowne, as irrelevant as it may
ultimately be, is the absolutely bizarre change in Tom Hanks' appearance. Perhaps taking a cue from his
Sleepless
in Seattle co-star Meg Ryan, Hanks has remade his face in some sort of plasticene image. Is it botox? A botched
eye job? The change in his appearance was immediately apparent to me even when I saw the teasers for the film on
television, but blown up to larger proportions on a flatscreen television and magnified by the resolution of Blu-ray, it's
truly appalling. What is wrong with these actors? Do they not realize we're not doddering idiots (well, some of us,
anyway) and will recognize they've done something to themselves? Ryan is virtually unrecognizable anymore, and
what was so wrong with her to begin with? She was
cute, for crying out loud. Now she's like some relic of one
of those websites devoted to plastic surgery gone horribly awry. Hanks was never a picture perfect leading man,
appearance wise, and in a way that has always been part of his appeal. Attempting to achieve some sort of, well,
faux youthfulness now that he's well into his fifties just seems pretentious. As I mentioned in my review of the
Catherine Deneuve starrer
Potiche, these vain Hollywood
icons should take a page from Deneuve (not to mention her elephantine costar in the film,
Gerard Depardieu) and just
age, for crying out loud. Okay, end of rant.
