Larry Crowne

The best thing I can say about Larry Crowne is that I ought to hate it, but I don't have the coldness to do so. Don't get me wrong: there are so many things wrong with this movie, it's hard to figure out where to start. If anyone's at fault, it has to be Tom Hanks, who's almost too charming, too decent, too Tom Hanks-ish here. But he's not just playing the title character, he's the producer, director, and co-writer (with Oscar nominee Nia Vardalos--yes, everyone, she got an Oscar nod for her My Big Fat Greek Wedding script); since he wore the most hats, he's the first target. But Larry Crowne is so sunny, so cheery, and so forced in maintaining its good-time attitude that it's both infuriating and mildly charming.

The lack of a conflict, or even of an antagonistic character, is the main culprit here. Hanks plays Larry, an eternally nice guy who gets fired from his job at a Wal-Mart-esque store because he doesn't have a college education. (I can't help but thinking, as other critics have pointed out, that Larry could have easily sued the store and won a lot of money, had he wanted to.) Larry decides to go to community college, so he can have an education and get a better job. While in his speech class, he meets and falls for his teacher, Julia Roberts. Now, she plays a character whose name looks kind of like, but not really at all, the words "tie knot." But she's Julia Roberts. And he's Tom Hanks. 15 years ago, this movie would've been huge. Now, it's almost something of a relic. But that's the movie in a nutshell. A guy learns to change his outlook in life while being the same upbeat person, gets a scooter, and falls in love.

With so little plot to dispense with, you'd think the movie would have plenty of time to fill in its main characters, but there's barely any development. We're told that Larry is divorced, but never meet his ex-wife or even get an idea of what happened in their marriage. Seeing as the economy plays something of a role in the story (Larry's deep in the hole with his mortgage, partly bought out from his ex), it makes no sense for the movie to gloss over this major part of the main character's life. We know from the cartoonish depiction that Julia Roberts is in a loveless, hateful marriage (to Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad, no less), but we know nothing of what brought them together. From the very first scene, it's clear that Roberts hates her husband, or that she should. He calls himself a blogger, but he's really just into looking at porn. (Speaking of, I highly await the part of Bryan Cranston's AFI highlight reel that includes the clip from this movie where he shouts, seriously, "I like BIG knockers!")

Roberts and her character are also central to the film's failings. It's no spoiler, I hope, to tell you that she and Hanks get together at the end of the movie. But you knew that, because OF COURSE they get together. Why would you see this movie expecting anything else? As it was pointed out by a few others who saw the movie with me, she and Hanks have no chemistry. At all. We know they'll get together because they're supposed to, but there's nothing on screen to make us interested in the coupling. What's worse is that we have no sense of Roberts playing a character outside of...well, Julia Roberts. Hanks has the same problem. The image that Hollywood has given us of Tom Hanks (and I think most everyone buys it, myself included) is that he's the late-20th-century version of Jimmy Stewart: ultra-nice, ultra-decent, ultra-good. That is the way Larry Crowne himself is written, so most of the movie plays as "young people" giving Tom Hanks a strange makeover that only makes him look cool to the other characters in the script, not anyone in the real world. Crowne is apparently a dope for not driving a scooter (granted, the mileage is great and cheap), and for not wearing scarves to college, and for myriad other weird things that no one in real life would get on a guy for. In essence, the biggest problem this movie has is that its view of the world is so skewed, you wonder when people like Hanks, Roberts, and Vardalos last entered it.

The way the younger characters and new media in general are portrayed is equally baffling. As I mentioned, Cranston's character is a self-proclaimed blogger, but this movie defines that vocation as looking at porn. Facebook and Twitter are name-dropped at the beginning of the movie by a fellow community college professor for being the main cause of short attention spans. It's nice to know that we never had ADD issues before 2004. When characters text, they do so with a rudimentary knowledge of how people communicate; maybe my frustration regarding the media aspect of this movie is that every single time the word "blog" is uttered, the contempt oozes off the screen. The young people are equally obnoxious here, even though they're played by relatively game actors. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a lovely young actress and acquitted herself well enough on the failed NBC series "Undercovers," but her character, Talia, is a frightening insight into how Hanks and Vardalos see people under the age of 30. She's yet another Manic Pixie Dream Girl (that term is, of course, copyrighted by Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club), someone who exists to change another character, someone who is filled with forced whimsy, unnatural and beaming the entire time.

See, it's Talia who changes Larry's life, redoing his house with feng shui, getting him to join her scooter gang (which is led by Wilmer Valderrama, trying so very hard to make us all forget that he was Fez once), changing his hairstyle, changing his clothes, and on and on and on. Not that Larry is presented as being so much of a schlub that he needs a makeover, but this platitude-spouting cipher says so, thus it happens. So why don't I hate this movie? The cast, aside from Roberts, who I think is the real weak link here, does their very best with really shoddy material. Hanks is always going to be a charming screen presence, even though his characterization of Crowne is weak. There are plenty of actors I like in other projects here, from Cranston to Malcolm Barrett of the late, lamented "Better Off Ted," to Rami Malek from "The Pacific." They, and the film's standout, George Takei (yes, that one), are having a lot of fun here, and make for the sparse moment of humor.

But I'll be honest: this movie is a spectacular mess, at best. I was watching this and honestly asking, "Is this movie real?" When Valderrama and his scooter group starts to snap, a la West Side Story, I couldn't help but bug my eyes out in shock. That such a scene is meant to be funny just made it more galling, honestly. This movie has its heart in the right place, I know, but it's such a miss from Hanks and company that I want to know what they thought they were accomplishing. For the most part, this is a piece of fluff, and I wonder if Hanks was aiming for anything more than a pleasant diversion. But on the other hand, when the economy is mentioned as being a weary burden on Crowne, I figure that, maybe, Hanks and Vardalos were aiming high and undershot it so much. What a strange, odd, and somewhat awful movie this is.