Go to the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Wikipedia page, and you’ll find that its favorite son is Ashton Kutcher, the musical The Pajama Game was set there and the city’s nickname is the “City of Five Seasons,” as the fifth season is time to enjoy the other four.
So yeah, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, doesn’t quite sound like the textbook place for a raunchy, sidesplitting comedy. Don’t be fooled — Cedar Rapids might be as boring as the rest of the Midwest, but Cedar Rapids is the standout comedy of the early part of 2011.
Ed Helms stars as Tim, a naïve and rather childlike insurance salesman working for a small company in his small Wisconsin hometown. Tim is sleeping with his former seventh grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver), but that’s just about the only exciting thing about him. The guy is diet soda with a side of vanilla ice cream.
That is, until Tim’s boss dies under mysterious (or auto-erotic asphyxiation) circumstances and he has to fill in at the annual regional insurance conference in luxurious Cedar Rapids. A reluctant Tim, who’s never been on an airplane, is charged with winning his company the Double Diamond award, a prestigious prize that they’ve won three years in a row.
With the help of three conference veterans (played hysterically by Anne Heche, John C. Reilly and The Wire’s Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and alcohol, Tim starts to come out of his shell. But when he learns just what he has to do for the Double Diamond, Tim’s small-town morals clash with his newfound self-liberty.
Helms does a fantastic job, basically playing the same character he does in The Office. Heche, Whitlock Jr. and especially Reilly also do dynamite jobs with some fantastic material, spitting out one-liners that both dad and son will enjoy.
The film does have problems, mainly the quick resolution that Tim finds by just telling the truth with a little help from his friends. For a movie with lines like “cornholing a crippled kid,” such a Sesame Street conclusion comes off as a little contrived. Conversely, other characters are left in limbo, with Weaver falling off the map and Heche’s character never having to reconcile a major conflict.
But if the writers left some holes in the plot, they left none in the dialogue, most of which cannot be reprinted here. In short, it’s funny, witty and bawdy without being over-the-top, helped out by director Miguel Arteta’s hands-off style.
Cedar Rapids isn’t the perfect comedy; its conventionality and simple ending hold it back. But it is well written, well-acted and completely unaffected. Most importantly, being a comedy, Cedar Rapids is downright hilarious, even if Cedar Rapids probably isn’t.
–Cameron Dunbar is a sophomore studying journalism. Send him Cedar Rapids tourist attractions at cd211209@ohiou.edu.
