Larry Crowne
For his first film as a director in fifteen years, Tom Hanks has chosen a light and enjoyable comedy about a man whose life is turned upside down when he is fired from his job working for a big retail chain called U-Mart. But Hanks, working from a script he co-wrote with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s” Nia Valdarlos, isn’t just looking for cheap laughs: instead, he wants to reflect to world most people are living in during the present economic downturn…uncertainty. Long since divorced from his wife, Larry– who went into the Navy as a cook after high school before ending up at U-Mart after 20 years service –doesn’t know what he’s going to do: he’s already in debt after a bad deal in the divorce on his house, and no one is really hiring, especially a middle-aged guy with no college education. His friend and neighbor, Lamar (played by Cedric the Entertainer) recommends going to school after all these years, and the Dean of Student Services points him to the classes he needs to survive in the current market: an economics course taught by an ego-driven professor (George Takei, hilarious), and a speech class at 8am that the teacher (Julia Roberts) is ready to cancel before Larry walks in, putting it at the minimum size for a classroom.
That’s all you really need to know walking in; part of the joy, somewhat muted by the film’s “tell-all” trailers, is seeing the unexpected places Hanks takes Larry in this film. As I was explaining to a friend of mine, “Larry Crowne” is seen, simply, as the unfolding of a situation. Yes, it takes some of the typical, “only in the movies” liberties with reality, but it follows its story on a natural, and believable, trajectory to its conclusion. “Wild Hogs” or other such mid-life crisis comedies this is not; Hanks loves Larry as much as he did the band of his endearing 1996 directorial debut, “That Thing You Do!,” and that love is played for genuine moviewatching pleasure rather than the calculated cynicism Hollywood usually puts into such films.
A big part of that is the supporting characters. Rather than being simply the “Tom and Julia Show,” “Larry Crowne” is populated by a rich cast of people who inspire both Larry and Mercedes (Roberts’s character) in their journies at this moment in time. The biggest impacts are made by Lamar and his wife, B’Ella (played by Taraji P. Henson), who are supportive and caring neighbors to Larry, as well as the young couple played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wilmer Valderrama. Both couples have found their own niche in life and how they can be happy in it, and they inspire Larry to take chances and to be the best Larry he can be. And it’s not just those four: there’s Brian Cranston as Mercedes’s writer husband, who’s taken to surfing for porn during the days; Pam Grier as a fellow professor, also stuck in a position she doesn’t enjoy anymore (funny that Grier played a character having similar mid-life questions in Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown”); Rita Wilson (Hank’s real-life wife) as an annoyingly perky bank manager; and Rob Riggle as a former boss of Larry’s who finds himself in an awkward place later. That said, it’s the irrepressible star power of Hanks and Roberts, both playing well within their comfort zones to wonderful effect, that makes “Larry Crowne,” both the film and the man at the center of it, a pleasure to watch.
