SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: The Sundance programmer who introduced Cedar Rapids to a capacity screening in a 1200-seat theater this morning made note of director Miguel Arteta’s long history with the festival, from the debut of his subversive breakout Chuck and Buck to his role as a volunteer advisor. It’s something that struck my friend and I as we left the perfectly pleasant, occasionally indelibly silly 90-minute film, mainly because Cedar Rapids feels independent in a different way: It will be just fine on its own.
Often the films that play out of competition—as this one did—maintain part of the off-center edge that first brought directors like Arteta’s fellow alum Miranda July (whose beguiling slacker phantasmagoria The Future also premiered out of competition) to the festival’s attention. It’s not that Cedar Rapids is bad so much as it doesn’t seem like Sundance showcase material: It’s a light, beat-by-beat corporate spoof that is already scheduled to hit theaters next month. Miranda July, meanwhile, is still seeking distribution.
Let’s call it a kettle corn comedy: A blend of salty and sweet that keeps you munching but won’t fill your belly with goodness or even really good laughs. Ed Helms plays a Midwestern naïf who sells insurance for a living at the grossly named 'Brown Star' agency. Tim Lippe is one of those 'mid'-everything characters Helms is cornering the market on: Mid-life, mid-level job, and above all, middling expectations. When the agency’s star dies suddenly in a sex accident, Tim is sent to the annual insurance convention in Cedar Rapids to try and bring home the two-diamond rating that will keep his boss happy. The prospect leaves Tim breathless, but then so does the crappy rental he’s assigned when he touches down in Iowa.
Arteta goes for a lot of the kind of knowing laughs that can feel condescending in more cynical hands—you know, get a load of these heartland boobs with their backwards ideas about what’s cool and how to live. The wood paneling kitsch was about to close in on me when John C. Reilly blew through the doors as Dean 'I love it!" Ziegler, the potty mouth hot mess who goes from Tim’s bête noir to his bestie. Reilly is ludicrously game as a recent divorcé who appears to have spent his post-married life building up his alcohol tolerance and thinking up new ways to curse out his lessers. Dionysian Ziegler has an especial lack of patience for the pieties that the Insurance association forces upon its members. Good insurance agents are supposed to be not just good sellers but good, Christian role models. They’re supposed to be Tim, in other words, who seems preserved in his seventh grade state, down to his (now consummated) crush on the teacher (played by a very funny Sigourney Weaver).
Much of the film comprises a series of set piece goofs on corporate retreat activities. Tim, Dean, and their third roommate Ron (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) pal around with Joan (a red-headed Anne Heche), a married mom who lets her work self get the kicks she’s missing at home. (It’s a mold very similar to Vera Farmiga’s carpetbagger in last year’s Up in the Air.) They go on scavenger hunts, they attend talent shows, and then right on the script’s team-building schedule they go off the conference’s agenda to get completely wasted and crash a wedding.
Each scene is loaded with puerile humor and so-remedial-it’s-ironic wordplay ('Cedar Crapids," 'Oh-my-God Nebraska") and as he proved in The Hangover Helms makes a decent straight man, this time to Reilly’s off-the-chain mad dog. It all clicks by smoothly, if kind of inevitably. Nothing happens in Cedar Rapids that you can’t see coming from Tim’s first plane ride to the conference where he’ll learn to cut loose, compromise his morals, and then stand up for himself, literally, and make a redemptive speech while music rises around him like cheap champagne bubbles. But if you’ve got a sweet-and-salty tooth and time to kill, you know what to do.
