Cliché- ridden comedy is a bad trip, man
Couple trade life in the Big Apple for stereotyped commune in mean- spirited story
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- commondenominator 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 laughchallenged effort.
It fits right alongside the other staledated 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 longhaired Lothario who believes in free love, man.
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 portapotty 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 cut- out, 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 a few hamstrings of believability, and Aniston is starting to look weary from the stretches.
Even acting opposite former flame Justin Theroux, who plays the playboy in plaid, Aniston looks exhausted by her own image.
A very sad, and frequently meanspirited, examination of the endangered American middle class, this comedy about recreating the status quo only makes our escapist urge feel cheap.