Occupied Comedy: Marino waxes, Rudd wanes in ‘Wanderlust’

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston in Wanderlust.

Wanderlust starts with an idea borrowed from Albert Brooks’ 1986 Lost in America—a yuppie couple responds to career setbacks by embarking on a cross-country journey that tests their mettle. Here, George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) leave their tiny, expensive Manhattan studio apartment and fall in among a collective of retrograde slackers in an off-the-grid Georgia commune called Elysium.

Where Brooks revealed Reagan-era acquisitiveness (climaxing symbolically in the existential absurdity of Las Vegas), Wanderlust drops metaphysics to oddly parody Clinton/Obama nostalgia about drugs and communes. It also seems like a retread of “it” director David Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer, similarly fully of bland, self-amused in-jokes by inoffensive comic performers who enjoy each other’s company more than any audience will.
But then something unexpected happens: in only a couple of scenes in which George visits his successful older brother Rick (Ken Marino) making money in the potty business and living miserably in Southern middle-class suburbia, the jokiness sharpens and Wanderlust momentarily becomes about something tangible—sibling rivalry, class delusions, marital tension, parental neglect, plus racism and sexism as spiritual fall-backs for pathetically disillusioned Americans.

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