Going Around the Zeitgeist

Larry
Crowne

Directed
by Tom Hanks

Runtime: 99 min.

It’s a relief that Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts
seem to have shaken off the toxic Mike Nichols influence of 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War. Their new project,
Larry Crowne, is the humanist
opposite to Hollywood’s self-congratulatory snark. In the title role, Hanks
plays a manager at a big box store who loses his job due to the screwy
corporate logic that he hasn’t enough college credits. It’s a nightmare
scenario redolent of the current political bombast that ignores economic
disaster with placating bromides about education. But Hanks turns nightmare
into daydream—envisioning the idea of American social goodness.

After a divorce, Larry minimizes his expenses—he
stores his SUV, forecloses his mortgage and enrolls in community college—and
thus the film becomes the first to openly deal with the ongoing financial
crisis. (Charlie Wilson’s War was
full of Bush-bashing contempt.) The script that Hanks co-wrote with My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s Nia Vardalos
lightly, craftily treats the spiritual solutions possible even in an
economically unstable culture. It avoids the crisis mode of last year’s The Company Men with its TV-style
sentimentality. By also resisting elitist delusions about class advancement
through education, the film posits a tale of spiritual transformation. A young
student named Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) befriends Larry and recognizes his life’s
maladjustment—and nicknames him Lance Corona.

Larry
Crowne goes around the zeitgeist and may risk ridicule
because of it. There’s a certain unhelpful political rhetoric that gets
promoted in the media because it is convenient to those in power. Filmmakers
like Mike Nichols can easily, coldly exploit that rhetoric and the cynicism can
also confuse comic motives as in Bad
Teacher—a zeitgeist calamity. But look at the difference in Hanks and
Vardalos’ concept of a bad teacher: Julia Roberts plays Mercedes, a bitter
clockpuncher who disdains her students and her job. (She’d rather teach
Shakespeare than “The Art of Informal Remarks.”) Roberts does hatefulness so
well that Mercedes’ self-pity compliments Larry’s sheepish lack of it. This is
a surprising characterization after the horrifying drag-act Roberts played in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Maybe Hanks and Roberts felt a need to set
things right. So their reunion here intentionally—organically—contradicts the
sarcasm of their previous film together. In renouncing those noxious political
assumptions, they find humanity in their new roles. Roberts has rarely been as
effective because she usually just flashes that horsey grin and sense of
superiority—which in Mercedes suggests a form of defensiveness. Her
vulnerability is part of what Hanks and Vardalos keenly perceive throughout the
film. They only misstep by extending less sensitivity to Mercedes’ desperate
husband—or perhaps Bryan Cranston’s performance is too obviously pathetic.

Larry
Crowne’s lack
of cynicism requires an audience that doesn’t hate itself. (The specter of
Cranston’s Bad Husband recalls Dede the pimp in Jean Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne, where pitiable behavior was
seen sympathetically—a transformative movie experience.) Hanks transforms all
the things Americans find easy to laugh at or be angry about: Race (Cedric the
Entertainer as Larry’s black neighbor tells him, “You’re pale in America. You
got a clean slate); Sex (Mercedes confesses a parking lot indiscretion while
hiding behind sunglasses); and Opportunity (Larry’s motor scooter excursions
are the film’s motif for individuals accessing mobility and liberation).

The Everyman face Hanks
wears in this role sometimes has a Forrest Gump aspect, but at other times his
eyes are sharply focused. It’s not just the makeover by Talia: Hanks envisions
sweet humane potential just as he did in his last directorial effort, the
blissful 1996 musical That Thing You Do.
That film was actually produced by Jonathan Demme but Larry Crowne shows Demme’s influence in its benevolent view of
human variety. Larry and his motor scooter gang (headed by Wilmer Valderrama)
recall the momentum of Demme’s 1977 film Handle
with Care (originally titled Citizens
Band) and radiant Gugu Mbatha-Raw is like a Demme cupid—a spirit
transcending politics. Hanks doesn’t have Demme’s depth or gravity, but Larry Crowne is irresistibly friendly, shot
in vivid tones by Philippe Rousselot and, most importantly, it’s non-toxic.