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Not many things are as funny as simple, clueless sincerity. The TV series “The Office” gets this. “Cedar Rapids,” the new insurance salesman-convention comedy starring Ed Helms, may be “The Office” meets “The Hangover.” What makes it work is its realistic footing and its hero’s heartfelt naivete.
Helms is Tim Lippe, small-town insurance agent, mid-man on the totem pole. He’s spent his whole working life there, but he’s slighted by the boss (Stephen Root, a comic volcano), always passed over for that coveted insurance agents’ convention in favor of the smarmy star salesman, Roger (Thomas Lennon).
But tragedy strikes, and Roger’s death (a funny one) means Tim must get on a plane for the first time and fly to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the first time to be away from home for the first time.
Tim leaves behind his lover (his sixth-grade teacher, Sigourney Weaver), straps on a money belt full of traveler’s checks and ventures into the big, wide world.
His missions: Win the coveted “two diamond” status from the insurance association president (Kurtwood Smith). And “avoid Dean Ziegler like the plague!”
Ziegler is trouble. He is played to gregarious, grotesque perfection by John C. Reilly. “Deanzie” is that blowhard who figures his loud voice, crude quips and ability to hold his liquor make him the life of the party. Naturally, Tim is forced to share a room with him and “an Afro-American” agent (Isiah Whitlock Jr., a hoot).
Tim is quickly caught up in a whirl of intrigue, back-stabbing and hard-partying, another soul pulled into the Deanzie vortex. It’s not just the booze and rule-flouting. There’s also the tempting, flirty and crude Joan (Anne Heche), an old hand at these leave-home/cut-loose conventions.
Director Miguel Arteta’s movie is a farce with sexual come-ons and actual sex that never loses track of its characters’ humanity. Screwballs one and all, they are still sometimes warm people who never cross into caricature.
Heche lets us sense Joan’s resignation to a dull, depressing life in Nebraska. Reilly never lets Deanzie turn so gonzo that we don’t see the divorced-man loneliness his bonhomie hides. And Helms keeps Tim’s innocence just this side of reality.
He’s a bit of a Pollyanna, but listen to him talk about that first childhood encounter with an insurance agent, a man whose job it was to “get people’s lives back on track,” and you too will think, “Yeah, they really are heroes.” And laugh.
review
What: “Cedar Rapids”
Starring: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Kurtwood Smith, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Stephen Root
Directed by: Miguel Arteta
Running time: 86 minutes
Rated: R for crude and sexual content, language, drug use