CEDAR RAPIDS Coasts on Ed Helms' Easy Charm (Blu-Ray Review)
Cedar Rapids is one of those movies that's pretty much given away in its entirety by the marketing. Stop me if you know where this is going: a simple, but good-natured guy goes out into the world for the first time and has his horizons expanded/expectations challenged, and his world will never be the same after he meets a quirky group of characters, etc. Maybe set the whole thing in the Midwest and give it a drab, brown color scheme, and you've got Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids. Arteta's a sure hand at the quirky character study: he's done it quite a few times in film and on TV with the sometimes squirm-inducing Chuck and Buck, a handful of episodes of Six Feet Under, and most recently with the very intriguing series Enlightened. With Cedar Rapids, Arteta doesn't exactly plumb the depths of his lead character Tim Lippe's (Ed Helms) soul. But then Tim isn't an especially deep guy--just a terribly nice one who learns that maybe he needs to be a little less so over the span of one weekend at a big insurance convention.
After his company's top insurance salesman (Thomas Lennon) dies, Tim is reluctantly drafted by his boss Stephen Root to head to the titular city to attend the big meeting of the insurance salesman and net the firm the big sales award they've picked up several years running. The problem is, the guy at the head of the convention is a puritanical hardass (Kurtwood Smith), and Tim keeps getting drawn into the orbit of hard-drinking loudmouth Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) and his party crew made up of Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and the flirtatious Joan (Anne Heche). I won't tell you what happens next, but drinking, sex, meth, and a rock climbing fill out the rest of Tim's first big weekend away from home.
Helms has a precarious job with a character like Tim, who has to seem prim and naive without coming off as a complete stick in the mud. Helms essentially nails it by playing the character as someone whose world is incredibly small and getting larger and more interesting whether he likes it or not. An orphan since childhood, he just wants to be loved, whether it's from his grade school teacher-turned lover (Sigourney Weaver) or the boss who raised him and keeps him on as a frequently badgered employee. Without Helms in the role, this movie might fall apart under the flimsiness of its premise.
Reilly is another part of the alchemy that keeps the movie together. He's required to be, by any objective definition of the word, a jerk, But given that it's Reilly, you feel like he's a great big teddy bear of a man who just doesn't realize that he's coming on too strong. Reilly is a secret weapon for a movie like this. When your premise isn't exactly fresh, you bring the talented actor out and he simply elicits a laugh effortlessly. Cedar Rapids is a better movie for his presence, but really that could be said for any movie starring Reilly.
