Larry Crowne is a magic trick of a movie; now you see it, now you don’t. Unfortunately, what that means is one minute you’re watching it, and the next it’s been completely erased from your mind. Larry Crowne is a frequent Employee of the Month at a big box store named U-Mart. He’s well liked by his fellow employees, and good at his job. But none of that matters when a corporate mandate comes down saying that anyone in management without a college degree must be fired. Having spent his early years in the Navy instead of college, Larry finds himself getting canned. Faced with unemployment and a shrunken job market, Crowne survives the only way he can, by liquidating his possessions and enrolling in college. Crowne isn’t in any way offensive. From the very first moments there are some chuckles to be had. The chuckles even keep up at a steady enough pace throughout the film’s runtime. But an occasional chuckle is all that you get. There’s nary a guffaw, you don’t get anywhere close to a belly laugh. And though Crowne himself is portrayed by Tom Hanks, one of the most charismatic and beloved actors working in Hollywood, he never manages to grab your attention the way a true protagonist should. Larry Crowne the movie is amusing at times, but never funny. Larry Crowne the character is amiable, but never charming. If there’s any word to accurately describe my viewing of this film, I’d say that word is “forgettable”.
The main problem with this movie is that none of the characters talk or behave like real human beings, so you never relate to them as such. When Larry gets fired, it’s by a collection of upper management goons who are cartoonishly callous in their methods. Here is Larry, about the most good-natured and well-intentioned man on the planet, and this circle of regular looking people is eviscerating him for seemingly no reason at all. The scene is played for nothing more than laughs, and it’s the dramatic crisis that’s supposed to set the entire film in motion. When he goes back to school he befriends a group of young people who have a moped gang and are obsessed with shopping for vintage clothes. The conceit of a group like this existing is a bit of a stretch, but not completely unbelievable. There is a certain breed of horn-rimmed hipsters out there who might take it upon themselves to start a moped gang. But these kids don’t look or talk like any hipsters I’ve ever seen. Where is the sarcasm, the faux intellectualism? Where is the drug use, the sleazy hipster sex? These kids are earnest rather than ironic. The only things they appear to be addicted to are sweets. They instantly take a middle-aged man in, give him a makeover, and let him be a part of their social circle; seemingly at random, with no established motivation. The whole subplot feels like a lame old person’s out of touch, idealized notion of what it must be like to be young these days, and it existed solely to be precious.
Larry Crowne tries very hard to be a film about starting over and making the best of a bad situation, but it undercuts itself at every turn. Instead of focusing on the ups and downs of losing your job and your possessions, and milking the drama out of this very trying situation; this movie makes it seem like its main character is having the time of his life. There is no struggle, no conflict, and no stakes in Crowne’s resurgence whatsoever. Sure, he loses his employment in the first scene of the film, but after that he just stumbles from good fortune to good fortune, never having a down moment. He’s constantly surrounded by good people who inexplicably care about him and do whatever they can to help him. By the end of the film he finds his life enriched and improved by the changes he goes through, but none of it is earned. Crowne remains passive while a parade of well meaning cartoon characters treat him like the center of the universe. Where is the interesting movie in that? Halfway in I was bored stiff. This film has no inherent drama, and instead offers us nothing more than the ridiculous moral that as long as you’re a good person, any setback you face will only be temporary, and will eventually make your life even better. Larry Crowne is so condescending I could slap it.
Even Tom Hanks, who is usually great in these sorts of roles, becomes prone to hammy overacting when working with this material. Perhaps he’s trying to make up for the fact that Crowne is such a blank page of a character, but whatever the explanation, I’ve never seen him so shamelessly mug for the camera before. And yes, I’m well aware of his early career and all of the awesome slapstick work that it contained. Really, the only reason that Hanks’ lead performance isn’t a complete disaster is the affection you bring into the theater for him already. This is Hanks coasting on reputation and his well-established persona alone. And eventually he looks so dumb wearing wallet chains and flashy clothing (a makeover that the film wants us to think is an improvement for the character) that even our pre-established affection begins to fade and we leave the theater just feeling bad for him.
The other big lead is, of course, Julia Roberts playing Hanks romantic counterpart and Speech teacher Mercedes Tainot, or Mercy for short. No, that’s not a typo, that’s really the character’s name. Mercy is a miserable woman who hates her life, hates her job, and hates her husband (Bryan Cranston in a thankless role). You can’t really blame her, she works at a community college that is barely staying afloat, her husband is very casually pursuing a career as a blogger in lieu of actually earning an income, and she appears to have a pretty serious drinking problem to boot. I get why she’s unhappy. But we never get any sense of the good person that might be living beneath the misery, and there’s never a hint that she might be struggling to achieve something greater. No, instead we’re just asked to wallow in Mercy’s misery alongside her. It’s not long before such a thankless task makes the character completely unlikable, so much so that her possible romance with Crowne is utterly sabotaged. Why would we want him to end up with this mean woman?
There’s a good amount of Tom Petty music in this film’s soundtrack, and I thought that the choice worked as a good metaphor for what this film tries to be. Tom Petty is very pleasant, unchallenging music that everybody likes. Almost effortlessly he makes songs with universal appeal. Larry Crowne is a movie that shoots for the same thing; but it tries so hard to please everyone that it ends up pleasing no one. It tries to be a drama, but it never puts its protagonist in any danger. It tries to be a comedy, but it never lets its unrealistic characters fly far enough into whimsy. And instead of gaining our affection by adding the music that we all love, the use of Tom Petty just highlights how well Petty is able to earn the response that this movie shoots for, and how short it falls pursuing the same goal. More than anything, while I was watching Larry Crowne I was wishing that I were just listening to the She’s the One soundtrack or watching episodes of Community instead. They succeed where this film fails, and don’t piss me off by wasting Bryan Cranston either.
