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Larry Crowne is Tom Hanks' second feature as a director, following 1996's That Thing You Do, and unlike that effort --- which, whatever you say about it, it held together as a more-or-less tight affair --- this one is a sad sorry mess.
Hanks plays the title character, a genial working stiff, a 20-year navy man happily embracing the grind on the sales floor of in a big box store, teaching trainees corporate policy as if he believes in the virtues of it himself, when wham-bam, he gets axed for not having any higher ed pursuits whatesover. Getting the point of the boot in his ass, he enrolls in a local community college, and his ordinary-guy virtues bless the lives of his new companions --- including: the neighbors who watch his life fall apart and reassemble; a bunch of 13th-graders of varying levels of stonedness in his speechifying class; his comely but sauced speechifying teacher (Julia Roberts) mourning her eroding marriage; and a gang of young, texting scooter enthusiasts who adopt him (yeah, I know).
Hanks, who turned his Apollo 13 and Saving Private Ryan roles into HBO miniseries about the real American heroes behind those parts, apparently thinks his middle-aged ordinary guyness is a trait Americans are obviously quick to embrace. We're all getting axed. Tom Hanks, fine American, tell us what to do.
Then there's the whole semi-aware virtuous savant thing --- like his lead characters from Forrest Gump and The Terminal --- here's another Tom Hanks guy that filmmakers think can just stumble into a situation, breathe the fresh air of old-fashioned decency, and stumble out with the benediction complete and the air cleansed and everybody just redeemed by the decency of it all. I don't want to be too cynical here --- I love decency (I am, in fact, crazy about it) --- but when the guy just goes from playing these paragons to casting himself as them, I get real nervous. As Mel Gibson will tell you, it's a slippery slope from casting and directing yourself in self-aggrandizing roles to becoming the biggest douchebag in Hollywood, and I don't think any of us want that from Tom.
But if Tom wants to be loved, his movie wants to be loved more. And that's a big problem here. To the extent that the film is a romantic comedy, that genre's formula demands colorful side characters, and this sucker forces them on you like a bouquet pushed in your face by a crazy aunt --- the sassy black neighbors, the sunny young bohemian who recruits him into the scooter gang (yeah, I know), the array of corporate tools who smile at him condescendingly as they fire him, the classroom of mitfits, Julia's girl-get-yo'self-together officemate. Ugh. The movie is so busy throwing colorful side characters at the wall that they forget to draw up any depth in the alleged leads. Double ugh.
(Not enough color for you? It's also got George Takei hamming his way to kingdom come. OK?)
So you know, it hints at things it could have been. It could have been about people responding to our financial malaise by downsizing their lives and, ultimately, realizing they're rightsizing them. It hints at that. It could have been a movie about the culture shock of being destroyed and adrift and setting foot on a college campus for the first time in your fifties. Somehow regaining your equilibrium. Hints at that too. How about a movie about what kind of astounding personal transformation it takes for a toothsome if lushy college professor (OK, junior college, but still) to ditch her layabout writer husband and take up with a former navy cook with no academic experience recently laid off from a big box store. Julia, with her fan-tas-tic hair and haggard face, kind of maybe thinks she's in that movie, but it really goes unexplored.
The movie thinks it's all of these things, but it's none. It's a sad little mess is what it is. So you know, some time in the next few weeks you may be walking around the video store, and stumble across Larry Crowne, and think to yourself, "Here's a film starring two A-list big shots, a handful of Oscars between them, who have proven in Charlie Wilson's War that they can work together, how come I don't recall this getting much of a push when it was in theaters?"
As will often be the answer in those situations, the marketers knew what they were doing.
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