No escaping a tired script
Aniston, Rudd in comic commune peopled by stereotypes
Imagine Martha Marcy May Marlene with a laugh track, or Jonestown with a jukebox playing the music from The Big Chill, and you get a good sense of the creepy edge on Wanderlust.
Hoping to slake the popular thirst for life-affirming, lowest-common-denominator romance, this underwhelming movie from David Wain stirs up some Kool-aid comedy from the tattered remnants of the American middle class.
George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) are an ordinary couple struggling to make it in the Big Apple. They accept their fate on the bottom rung, but are intent to climb out of their cramped studio apartment and make it to the penthouse one day, because that’s the dream.
George and Linda bought into the promise of a better tomorrow, but the blinders are coming off in a hurry: George just lost his office job to the financial crisis and Linda’s great ambition of making documentaries about penguins with cancer recently spiralled in a development meeting with HBO.
That’s a joke, by the way: Penguins with cancer is a comic motif that waddles all the way through this laugh-challenged effort.
It fits right alongside the other stale-dated devices, including a car in the swamp, a mixed-race couple who talk about being a mixed-race couple, a hippie with dementia, and a long-haired Lothario who believes in free love, man.
There’s also a viper-faced feminist, a winemaking nudist, and a libidinous nymphette, because, without off-the-rack caricatures to fill the frame, this movie would be an earnest training video for marriage counsellors.
In fact, we could use a little Dr. Phil by the halfway point, because there’s not enough plot to keep the narrative chugging — even with the half dozen support staff from central casting.
The basic outlines of the movie seem workable: George and Linda become statistics in a changing economy. Without work, George is forced to move back to his hometown and work for his older brother, a porta-potty mogul who wears his cellphone on his belt, and drives a Cadillac Escalade.
That’s another joke, by the way — because grotesque symbols of overconsumption and bad taste are hilarious, especially when you’re a bitter sophisticate whose gifts have been overlooked by a shallow society.
There’s not much charity behind these cardboard stereotypes, and that’s probably the biggest problem in this movie about George and Linda’s bid to join a commune: There’s so much anger and resentment lurking behind each cutout, everyone starts to feel loathsome and petty by the second act.
Paul Rudd is the kind of actor who can make neurotic weakness seem attractive, because he’s cute and smart, but even he is flattened by the slow-moving steamroller of cliché.
Aniston suffers a similar fate, and it’s the same snag that has limited her entire career to date: She’s stuck in the twilight zone of feminine expectation.
She’s supposed to be nice, but also capable of snapping edgy zingers. She’s supposed to be sexy, but simultaneously wholesome. She’s supposed to be the gal next door, but not without a hint of hormonal urgency.
No one can straddle such distances without destroying believability, and Aniston is starting to look weary.
Even acting opposite former flame Justin Theroux, Aniston looks exhausted by her own image.
The same could be said for everyone, including Alan Alda, who takes on the role of the aging hippie. The characters have no relief, no edge, and no redeeming element of surprise. They almost seem to bore themselves.
The only moments when the movie feels truly alive are when Wain sinks his teeth into some meaty issue of manhood, or mocking the bourgeoisie.
The very best character is the alcoholic wife who shops on Skymall — the inflight magazine — and really, that’s not saying much about the script.
A very sad, and frequently mean-spirited, examination of the endangered American middle class, this comedy about recreating the status quo only makes our escapist urge feel cheap.