Cedar Rapids.

Cedar Rapids (2011)

Dir. Miguel Arteta

15

           

            This week sees the release of Miguel Arteta’s Cedar Rapids (2011) on DVD, a film that hit our screens back in April to almost universally lukewarm acclaim. Cedar Rapids was billed as a Hangover-esque buddy comedy, the sort of film that ordinarily would have slipped beneath my radar like a greased U-Boat had it not been for the added cachet of a Sundance official selection laurel.

            Ed Helms stars as Tim Lippe, a sheltered and childlike man who finds himself the unexpected benefactor of a career-changing opportunity. Lippe is forced to step out of his comfort zone and attend an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; a place of brash personalities and impenetrable cliques.  At first, the convention is an affront to Tim’s delicate sensibilities and a harsh contrast to the sleepy, unchanging world he inhabited back in Wisconsin. With the help of his newfound friends Joan (Anne Heche), Ronald (Isiah Whitlock) and the irrepressible Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), Tim is drawn from his shell and embarks on a life-changing whirlwind of debauchery. Along the way, Lippe is confronted with a number of moral decisions that have a great bearing on his own life, and those of the people around him.

            I was pleasantly surprised by Cedar Rapids. Despite the fact that some of the humour was of the ubiquitous Hangover school, laughs were plentiful, helped considerably by an energetic and charismatic performance from Reilly. The film is primarily a character piece; some of the scenes between Lippe and the seductive, worldly Joan Ostrowski-Fox are very nicely handled and Arteta has done an exemplary job of capturing the nervous, almost surreal excitement of a fledgling relationship. Despite this, Cedar Rapids suffers from a tendency to cross the line into the overblown; it’s let down in parts by some unnecessarily frantic set pieces that disrupt the film’s carefully constructed world. Overall though, Cedar Rapids has more to offer than your standard Hollywood fare, as the Sundance connection would suggest there’s a great deal here for fans of quirky, character-driven comedy.