Final Grade: B
With a movie as tightly focused as Cedar Rapids, creators walk a thin line from portraying sheltered, small-town, innocent characters as earnest, and making fun of them. Producer Alexander Payne, whose films Election and About Schmidt both center on characters not often found in mainstream movies, shows his touch on this film more than director Miguel Arteta, whose films Youth in Revolt and The Good Girl are pretty good examples of character-focused pieces. What comes out is a film that moves in small strokes, not broad comedy, and succeeds in being a curiosity, if not a canonical classic.
If there’s anything the film proves, it’s that Ed Helms’ star-making turn in The Hangover was not a one-hit wonder in movies. The guy is just a terrific actor, so committed to his role as a Wisconsin salesman trying to keep his branch of BrownStar Insurance running smoothly by winning the coveted “Two Diamond Award” at a regional insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The very idea of that city being a big metropolis on par with Las Vegas or some other debauched place is purely ridiculous, and the film often comes off in its early stages as though it is indeed making fun of these small town people who derive any joy from their piteous little conference in a shitty hotel in Iowa. What saves the film from being callous are its performances by a great cast, including John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Sigourney Weaver and Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development.
The film is admirable in the way it attempts to depict the whole picture of its characters, the best example being Anne Heche’s character, who seems like a perfectly wholesome person and devoted wife, but who uses the conference in Cedar Rapids as a vacation from her life. The bits of darkness seep in at the corners, with Reilly’s recent divorce, Helms’ character losing his parents at a young age and Shawkat’s situation as a prostitute. Without making the message too didactic, the film gets across the point that Helms is outgrowing his Wisconsin bubble, leaving the nest and maturing in the way he couldn’t as a child.
Cedar Rapids was a hit at Sundance, and like a great many films to find an audience at that festival, it’s very confined, depicting a handful of odd characters. It’s being marketed as the next in the Step Brothers, Walk Hard, and Old School vein. John C. Reilly does a pretty standard Will Ferrell rambunctious impression, and hopefully the film will benefit from the misleading advertising, because it deserves to be seen for its small merits. It works as a nice parallel to The Hangover in a lot of ways, being a far more muted and subtle film about four friends drinking and getting into random escapades, but with some deeper character development and redeeming characters, the smaller film is worth the time.