Dir. Tom Hanks, USA , 2011, Dur. 99 mins
Cast: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Cedric The Entertainer
Review by Carlie Newman
Somewhat disappointingly this film, which promises so much in terms of the two major stars who feature in it, does not deliver in the expected way.
Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) is fired from the U-Mart store where he’s worked for decades on the pretext that he didn’t go to college. Divorced, with a high mortgage still to pay and an SUV that requires a lot of expensive fuel, he is encouraged by his neighbour Lamar (Cedric the Entertainer) to enrol in his local community college. Here he takes various classes including Economics with an eccentric Japanese professor (George Takei) and a Speech and Communications class, taught by Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts), a teacher with her own problems.
Mercedes’ husband, Dean, stays at home, basically porn-surfing, although he says he is researching a book. Mercy is beginning to get somewhat fed up with going to work every day, while he looks at big-busted women on the screen. In order to keep going, Larry sells his house, rides a scooter to save money and works at a diner. He is encouraged to dress in a more modern fashion and join a scooter-gang by a fellow student, Talia (British newcomer, Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Dean makes one too many derogatory remarks to his wife and she chucks him out. At this point a relationship starts between middle-aged navy veteran Larry and Mercedes, a teacher who is more interested in getting out of class quickly and having a few drinks than actually teaching her students.
It is Hanks as director, who is at fault for the failure of the film. Generally a good actor on screen, he comes across here as wooden and, apart from some tears near the beginning, is almost emotionless. Roberts, as usual, looks lovely, but her facial expressions are pretty much limited to pouting or smiling. The two kiss in a most awkward manner – kind of wrapping around the other one’s body and we don’t actually see their lips meet! Although the film is not over long, there is one scooter ride by Larry’s new gang which seems interminable.
However, all is not bad in this film: the idea of the blue collar worker coping in a recession by going back to college, where he is virtually the only older person in the class, in order to get a belated education to become more marketable, is interesting and worth showing on film. The only question is whether a very obvious Ton Hanks film – not only directed and starring himself, but also co-written by him – is the right vehicle?
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