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Follow us on TwitterYou don’t need to go to college to stock shelves at Wal-Mart. You can’t live off of 500k indefinitely. Scooter gangs don’t act like teenage girls, assuming they even exist. And college students do not act in a way that makes Joel McHale and the gang on Community appear to be a realistic depiction of college life. Yet the new Tom Hanks film Larry Crowne, which Hanks not only starred in, but co-wrote and directed, begs to differ.
Larry Crowne tries to be an intelligent, relevant, recession-era comedy about a good guy hit by hard luck during tough times, adult fare for a movie season filled with superheroes and fighting robots, but instead, is a hodge-podge of poorly executed ideas and caricatures.
Tom Hanks plays the title role, an awe-schucks everyman who after being fired from his job at a Wal-Mart-esque superstore for not having at least a couple of semesters of higher learning under his belt, is encouraged to go to community college by his neighbor across the street who had the good fortune to win $500,000 on a game show a few years back and thus retire twenty years early and open the year-round yard sale of his dreams. Once in school, Hanks is taken under the wing of the free spirited leader of a multi-racial motor-scooter gang that, when not aimlessly riding around Los Angeles, waving at friendly bikers, and stopping at small diners for good food and stilted, 1960s exchanges with blue-collar workers, spends its time giving one another makeovers, feng sui-ing one another’s apartments, and initiating new members into the gang through a ritual involving plenty of finger-snaps and giggles. Also in college Crowne meets Mercedes Tainot, played by Julia Roberts, a burned out lit teacher just waiting for an enthusiastic, middle-aged, nice-guy student to reinvigorate her passion for her job after years of dealing with virtually empty classes filled with students who act like actors from the local community center comedy troupe who had never gone to college, as well as a stay-at-home husband who passes the day exercising, napping, commenting on blogs, and looking at pictures of women in bikinis that, in the world of this film, somehow constitutes porn.
If Larry Crowne took itself more seriously, it may have been able to pass for an Alexander Payne-style dramedy about middle-aged individuals dealing with the disappointments of life. If it took itself less seriously, and perhaps had Ben Stiller in the lead role, it could have potentially worked as another title in the string of over-the-top comedies Stiller did throughout most of the previous decade. But instead Larry Crowne unsuccessfully tries to combine its wackier elements, which aren’t funny, with its more serious backdrop, which is not only diminished by the wackier elements, but by the fact that the film is completely out of touch with the lower-middle class segment of society it is trying to portray.