Dir. Miguel Arteta, USA, 2011, 87 mins
Cast: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock, Sigourney Weaver
By Philippa Bradnock
For all its booze and bluster, Cedar Rapids offers a vision of small town America which belongs in the age of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, rather than than the forest of foreclosure signs, which currently makes up much of the Midwest. The honest guys are drunkards, philanderers, and dullards but at least they’re not cheats.
Helms is played by Tim Lippe (pronounced ‘lippy’, a clunky paradox to emphasise Tim’s agreeability). He’s an upstanding insurance agent from Brown Valley. The star of his firm is found dead in unfortunate circumstances and Tim is called on to go to the annual ASMI insurance conference up at the big city, Cedar Rapids. He’s never been out of town before and never stayed in a hotel. What could go wrong? Warned to stay away from lecherous no goodnik Dean Ziegler (Reilly) and to behave with the utmost decorum, Tim soon careers wildly off the rails, breaking with teetotalism, skinny dipping in the pool and sampling hard drugs encouraged by hookers with hearts of gold.
Tim is the kind of male ingenue who only exists in movies, and only there to have the scales ripped from his eyes, even as he imparts life lessons to the lost souls he encounters. There are nods to the cynicism of modern America. There is corruption in the system at the ASMI conference. And Tim reminisces about the great flood of Cedar Rapids, whose aftermath apparently saw heroic insurance brokers fighting for a fair deal for their customers, presumably a nod to the thousands left struggling by Hurricane Katrina and the lack of any help for them. But on the whole things are raucous but not all that challenging.
Tim is not only naïve about matters of business, it turns out. He is also prey to several ruthless women: his ex primary school teacher, Macy Vanderhei (Weaver) and a fellow conference-goer, Joan ‘O-Fox’ (Heche), both of whom prove a lot more relaxed about the emotional bonds of sexual intercourse than does Tim. He is a kind of small-town 40 Year Old Virgin. But Helms, despite his Saturday Night Live pedigree, lacks Steve Carell’s attractiveness or comic timing, and his character’s misunderstanding of his relationships only serves to make him seems a little more bizarre.
The first half of Cedar Rapids is uneasy and unsettled in its tone. Lippe is so farcically naïve it’s hard to work out whether he’s intended as a caricature or a likeable child-man. The second half, after friendships with his unsuitable co-brokers are cemented, is funnier and more feelgood – there’s a plot to uncover and morals to stick to. But the whole film never finds its pace or tone. None of the characters are particularly likeable or particularly funny, and it really needs to be one or the other. Arteta’s previous outing, Youth In Revolt had the same stilted tone, but managed many more laughs and clever observations. Ultimately Cedar Rapids leaves you feeling a bit too much like you’ve spent an OK weekend in an overheated mid-range hotel with people who are fine, really fine, but you just can’t quite like them enough to want to stay in touch.
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