The term “fish out of water” is a little misleading. When a fish is taken out of water it just flops around until it dies. We call movies like Cedar Rapids fish out of water stories, but the characters usually leave their unfamiliar situation stronger than they entered it. I guess the term comes from the flopping around that makes up most of the action. In this movie the fish is a sheltered, buttoned down insurance agent named Tim Lippe who is tapped to go down to the “big” city of Cedar Rapids and represent his agency at an insurance convention. The flopping happens when his straight laced demeanor chafes against the hard partying ways of the other agents, who treat the annual convention as a sort of lame, grown up version of spring break. The question is whether or not Lippe leaves his situation a stronger person, or face down like a dead fish.
A lot of the comedy in this film comes from presenting the mundane in a mock-heroic light. It’s a form of humor that usually tickles me to no end. Selling insurance is a subject that would bore most people to tears, but Lippe thinks that it’s the most important job in the world. Going to a convention in Cedar Rapids would be a pain for most people, but the dorks in this movie treat it like the greatest thing in their lives. And in addition to that finding humor in the quiet desperation of the everyman’s life approach, there is also just a boatload of great comedic actors in this doing all sorts of funny things. The excess of talent this cast contains got to be so much that my audience started to cheer in a Pavlovian manner just for fan favorite actors showing up to play bit parts. Tom Lennon’s face on screen: cheer. Stephen Root shows up: someone hoots. If nothing else, Cedar Rapids is funny. There is broad, drunken people falling over humor; tiny little character stuff, like a wife casually grabbing the steering wheel from her raging husband, as if his flying off the handle and taking his hands off the steering wheel while driving is an every day occurrence. Comedically, there’s a little bit for everyone.
Tim Lippe is played by Ed Helms, who is probably best known as Andy on the US version of The Office. That show’s lead actor, Steve Carell, also made his debut as a starring actor in a feature film by playing a sheltered, nerdy adult man who is in an arrested state of development with The 40 Year-Old Virgin. That movie was really well liked and it ended up making Carell a really big star, so comparisons between this and that are probably going to be unavoidable. Unfortunately for Helms, comparing the two is a good way to point out the inherent faults in his character. Carell’s character in The 40 Year-Old Virgin was a good guy, but a little bit sheltered, and a little bit scared of life. At some point he got so comfortable living in his own little world that he became completely freaked out by anything that didn’t fit nicely into his comfort zone. He’s self aware about the matter though, he wants to change, and he wants to become a more rounded person. The movie is about his struggle to expose himself to things outside of his wheelhouse and grow. Helms’ Tim Lippe is also a nice guy. He has a good heart, and he generally cares about the people in his life. But the sheltering of his character is presented as being so extreme that he comes off like a complete space alien. He isn’t just in an arrested state of development; he has the mind of a six year old. He falls in love with every girl who’s nice to him for a second. He recoils at the sight of a black man. His down home morality is so severe to become borderline fascism. His confrontations with booze or casual sexuality don’t just make him squirm; they often make him break out into tears like some sort of creepy man-baby. Tim Lippe is clearly a good guy on the surface level, but if I told you he was a serial killer in his private time it wouldn’t surprise you a bit. Helms is funny in the role, and he pulls off everything that is asked of him well, but I feel like the film suffers a bit from the way that the character was written. If Lippe were the uptight side character in a comedy like this, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash. But as the protagonist, I felt like I needed someone more relatable; more of a straight man and less of a stiff board to bounce things off of.
Strangely enough, while the main character comes off as a bit of a cartoon, all of the other characters are portrayed as complex, three dimensional, real people. It’s in the supporting roles that Cedar Rapids finds its greatest strengths. When you hear that John C. Reilly plays one of the main characters, a hard partying loudmouth of an insurance salesman named Dean Ziegler, it sounds like a role that’s probably designed so that he can steal the movie. Well it is, and he does. But he doesn’t do it by being as over the top and insane as you might imagine. Deansy is a drunk, he’s often a fool, but he isn’t the sort of manic psychopath that Reilly is known for playing in films like Step Brothers. He’s vulnerable and needy where some of his other characters can be nihilist jerks. It lets him be a jerk, but it keeps him from being completely unlikable. He weaves a tapestry of filth with his dialogue, but it’s mundane filth. He’s never legitimately clever, just obscene and obvious. His character isn’t supposed to be somebody that we love, but a parody of people that we have met and largely hate. And he does it so well that you end up loving him anyway. Having him say things that make him look more like a jackass than a comedian is a bit of a risk. It results in fewer laughs per minute than the usual manic hilarity that people expect from one of Reilly’s comedic performances, but it’s a risk that paid off for me. This works better as parody; it’s subtler, smarter comedy that sits with you longer that just quipping quotables.
Anne Heche gives probably the most nuanced, interesting performance in the film. I haven’t seen anything that she’s been in since the late 90s, so I wouldn’t claim to be completely up on her as an actress, but I’ve never seen her do anything as good as this. She plays an up for a good time party girl of an insurance salesperson named Joan Ostrowski-Fox. Though she’s a woman married with children, she comes to the yearly convention looking largely to get drunk and hook up. The character should be contemptible. We get no explanation why she cheats on her husband; we don’t even get any real sense of what her married life is like. The fact that she chooses to turn a work trip into an excuse to let loose and engage in some thoughtless infidelity once a year would usually work to make a character a villain. But Joan has such warmth and such humanity that you can’t help but think that she must be a good person despite it all. We watch her be loyal to her friends; we watch her sacrifice for others. Clearly, if she needs this sort of release once a year, she must be under some pretty legitimate stress in her home life. We watch this character engage in some irresponsible, stupid behavior; but we are never able to blame her for it, because she feels like somebody that we could know and sympathize with in our real lives. When she sets her sights on Lippe I got the sense that she could really break his heart and destroy him with her wanton behavior, but by the end of the film I was glad that he had to take his lumps and learn his lessons with her. It’s hard to imagine many other slutty adulteresses handling the situation with such maturity and grace.
Isiah Whitlock Jr. rounds out the main cast playing Ronald Wilkes, an insurance selling family man who is almost as straight laced as Lippe. He gets less to do than the other three characters, but he’s always funny with what he gets. His humor is dry and small. He comes up with little sayings and abbreviations that are far less clever or amusing than he thinks, but he delivers them with a simple modesty and an ignorant bemusement that makes them work. Ron is a big dork, but he’s a cuddly dork. He’s the guy you know who is usually pretty boring, but if you get one or two drinks in him he can come up with a good zinger or two by the end of the night. In a way I appreciated his performance for how small it was. This wasn’t Ronald Wilkes’ movie to steal, so Whitlock doesn’t attempt to. He accepts his position as a utility player and lives in Wilkes’ skin as authentically as he can. He does get one big scene to shine, where they play off the fact that he is an actor from The Wire, and he is able to get big laughs with it. I loved him as the charismatic Clay Davis in that show and it was interesting to see him play such a different, more introverted character here. Whitlock is an actor that I would like to see more from.
Cedar Rapids
