"LARRY CROWNE"
Screenplay Written by Tom Hanks and Nia Vardalos
Directed by Tom Hanks
** (two stars)
“It’s nice to be nice to the nice.”
-Maj. Frank Burns (“M.A.S.H.”-television series)
Tom Hanks’ “Larry Crowne” is a nice movie. It’s a feel good, inoffensive, tame, tender-hearted story about a middle aged man rebuilding his life after arriving at a devastating crossroads. But, also and most unfortunately, “Larry Crowne” is also bland, torpid, humdrum, flavorless and uncreatively routine. It is a film so toothless that it barely registers any lasting impressions.
In the past on Savage Cinema, I have often praised films that elicited a more positive spin on humanity. Films where characters only existed to try and do the right thing by others as well as themselves. Films that did not wallow in cruelty, darkness or even possessed any discernable villains. Just last year, I gave extremely high praise to three films that accomplished that very feat: Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought A Zoo,” Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” and the hugely entertaining return of “The Muppets.” For me, all three of those films showed exactly how stories containing a brighter outlook could be made for wide audiences without drowning in treacle or insufferable sap and prefabricated stabs at uplift. All three of those films knew very well that any sense of uplift to the soul of the viewer had to be earned through high standards of storytelling and thankfully, all three succeeded powerfully.
Yet for “Larry Crowne,” there seemed to be an uncomfortable bit of forced merriment at hand. There is more than enough honest pathos and uplift inherently contained in the story but for me, Hanks well overplayed his hand through broadly created characters and storytelling that was dangerously simplistic. This was very surprising to me especially as this film is coming from someone who has given us complex and near Herculean performances in a variety of challenging material from Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia” (1993), Robert Zemeckis’ “Forrest Gump” (1994) and “Cast Away” (2000) and of course, Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998), among others. “Larry Crowne” is not exactly a bad movie, so to speak. Like I said, it is a nice movie. It’s just one that is boldly uninspiring and for all of the talent at hand, I recommend that unless you happen to stumble upon this feature on cable and cannot find your remote in order to change the channel, just give this one a pass.
Tom Hanks stars as the titular Larry Crowne, a middle aged, divorced, Navy veteran currently employed in a large Target styled box store. As the film opens, Larry is called into a meeting with his superiors. While he thinks that he will be awarded with yet another “Employee Of The Month” certification, Larry is blindsided with the news that he is being downsized due to the fact that he has never earned a college degree and will ultimately never advance within the company.
Soon, and after taking the advice of his perpetually yard-selling neighbor Lamar (Cedric The Entertainer), Larry enrolls at the local community college with the hopes of earning a degree which will hopefully jump start the rebuilding of his life. In addition to an Economics course, taught by the intimidating Dr. Ed Matsutani (a pleasant George Takei), Larry joins a speech course taught by the angry, depressed and alcoholic Professor Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts), who happens to be unhappily married to a boorish, internet porn surfing husband (Bryan Cranston).
Throughout the remainder of the film, Larry Crowne makes grand financial changes in his life, most notably trading his gas guzzling minivan for a more economical scooter. He also diligently plugs away at his courses, finds part time work as a cook in a local restaurant, makes friends with his “zany” band of speech classmates and is also befriended by the much younger and improbably lovely Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who takes Larry Crowne under her wing and enlists him in her scooter riding gang, much to the chagrin of her boyfriend (Wilmer Valderrama).
And of course, how could Mr. Crowne’s life be complete without falling in love, especially with the lonely Professor Tainot teaching the class that will change his life?
“Larry Crowne” is a contemporary story told in an unapologetically old-fashioned way. In some respects, it seems as if Hanks and his co-screenwriter Nia Vardalos have concocted something to function as sort of a modern day Frank Capra styled experience. But, what Hanks and Vardalos have forgotten entirely were realistic, relatable characters and a profound sense of gravity to shoulder any sort of uplift the story is attempting to reach. Yes, in tone and temperament, “Larry Crowne” feels to be in line with Hanks’ wonderful directorial debut “That Thing You Do!” (1996), but unlike that film, “Larry Crowne” lacks a sense of realism to go along with the feel good, populist fantasy. It was a film that seemed as if there was a neon sign present from start to finish announcing to everyone watching that this is a nice man and these are nice people so therefore, shouldn’t we all just be pleasantly swept away in a sea of niceness and call it a day. While this tactic may work for some, for me, it did not work at all.
Frankly “Larry Crowne” felt more like a pilot episode of a forgotten early 1980s sitcom than anything that could’ve been directed by a two time Oscar winner. I mean, here is likeable, affable everyman Larry Crowne who lives next door to his wacky neighbors and makes wacky friends at the community college and finds himself engaged in a will they/won’t they romance with a potentially unattainable prospect. It’s a bit of Bob Newhart merged with a heaping helping of hokum that would be firmly set in place on any old episode of “The Facts Of Life.” All, and I really mean ALL of the characters in the film are less than paper thin and contain the exact sort of “color” that only exists in the movies, therefore making everyone blandly quirky and undercuts some otherwise engaging performances. This is also a bit of an oddity as the cast of “Larry Crowne” is refreshingly racially diverse but sadly, they are all painted with the same gigantic vanilla brush.
This is most notable in the case of Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who does make quite a charming impression but she is not well-served by this character who seems to function as if there are quotation marks around her for the entire movie. Her character of Talia is such an unrealistically chirpy free spirit with passion for thrift stores, tattoos and scooters that those features would be bad enough to stomach on their own. But the fact that she takes such a liking to Larry Crowne, so much so that she is willing to give his entire life a makeover, for no other reason than the script says so made it more insufferable than I think Hanks would have wanted. And in some ways, it could be argued that Talia is nothing more than yet another male devised fantasy girl. A cute, pleasant and innocent one but a fantasy nonetheless.
As for the film’s major love story, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts have absolutely NO chemistry whatsoever. Roberts’ alcoholism and marital problems felt painfully manufactured and Bryan Cranton’s performance and character are ridiculously cartoonish. To my heart, the love story between Larry Crowne and Mercedes Tainot felt to be entirely market researched than something honestly explored, felt or let alone developed. It felt as if the studio announced that since two mega stars were in the film, they had to have a romance, whether it made narrative sense or not. And in the end, I just didn’t care.
And yet, there was one element in the film that literally drove me crazy above all of my other criticisms. The name “Larry Crowne” is uttered CONSTANTLY and ENDLESSLY throughout the film and by nearly every character, as if Hanks was afraid that audiences had too short of an attention span to remember the name of the titular character of the movie they have all paid to watch. That poor decision made this film to be a movie for the terminally confused.
Look, dear readers, I could be even harsher on this movie but it wouldn’t feel right as the criticism would be too easy and akin to hurting a defenseless animal. “Larry Crowne” is a well made film and it does indeed have its heart in the right place and I cannot fault it for that. But, as I said, the film does not earn any good fortune it wishes to attain from potential viewers. I once had a discussion with someone regarding the process of “earning” in a feature film. The person questioned my view, wondering why a film had to necessarily earn anything. To that, I explained that earning any emotion from a movie, whether it is happiness, sorrow, fear, excitement or any other response all comes down to the effectiveness of good storytelling. A film just can’t be happy because the script proclaims it to be. The story, and how it is told, has to make us care about what happens. It has to earn our good will in order for the experience to become a memorable and meaningful one.
Going back to “We Bought A Zoo,” “Hugo’ and “The Muppets,” for all of the sunshine in those films, there were also honest depictions of grief, mourning, disappointments, failures, melancholy, confusion and painful nostalgia at their respective cores, thus giving the works in their entirety some true weight and making the resulting uplift entirely honest and completely earned. Instead of just being told that things would turn out happily, we went on the journey with those characters, making their uplift work in collaboration with our own.
And really, please do take a moment and think of a film like Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” (1946) and what a grim, dark, despairing film it actually is and how far it goes to earn the conclusion we all know so very well.
“Larry Crowne” is a film that takes absolutely no creative and emotional risks whatsoever with the storytelling or performances. Granted, it could be argued that the film’s overall earnestness in our deeply cynical, post-ironic age would be and could be the risk in and of itself. I could concede to accepting that point.
But, for me and my own sensibilities, being nice for niceness sake is just not good enough.
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