Miguel Arteta (2011)
Cedar Rapids is entertaining enough but the main interest comes from thinking how differently this material would have been handled in a British film. The main pleasure for me came from realising how much I prefer the American treatment. The film is about an insurance salesman, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), who works for a company in Wisconsin called Brown Star. As Anthony Lane pointed out in the New Yorker, these names say a lot. Tim is, to put it mildly, a naïf and, when he gets what he sees as the chance of a lifetime to represent the company at an insurance salesmen’s regional conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (a real place), he’s both excited and intimidated. Tim has a lot to live up to. For several years past, the company has won the convention’s prestigious ‘two diamonds award’, thanks (Tim thinks) to the superb professional skills of his predecessor Roger Lemke (Thomas Lennon). Roger is unable to attend on this occasion after dying in an auto-erotic asphyxiation episode. Going to Cedar Rapids, Tim is an innocent abroad to (as Anthony Lane also noted) an incredible degree: for example, we’re meant to believe this man, who’s in his mid-thirties, has never flown before. When he finds himself rooming at the conference with Ronald Wilkes, an African-American (Isiah Whitlock Jr), and Dean Ziegler (John C Reilly), who’s as cynical about the insurance world as Tim is idealistic, the experience is world-shattering.
It’s long odds on that in a British equivalent the piss-taking names of the protagonist and his place of work would have been just the beginning. Imagine the main part being played by Steve Coogan or Ricky Gervais or almost any other likely candidate with the exception of Martin Freeman: the performer’s self-satisfied sarcasm would have obliterated any characterisation. That doesn’t happen with Ed Helms, who hasn’t the greatest comic range but is often resourcefully funny and nearly always likeable – because his playing is empathetic. His lack of knowingness enables Helms to get you to accept, at some level, Tim’s farcical voyage of discovery. At the convention talent show, Tim is railroaded into doing a turn. He reprises his version of ‘O Holy Night’ from last year’s office Christmas party, replacing the lyrics with a paean to the glories of Brown Star Insurance. Helms gets this just right: of course it’s ridiculous but the growing confidence of his singing expresses Tim’s true belief in his vocation. Needless to say, John C Reilly tunes into the disreputable Dean Ziegler – it’s a fine comic turn that never loses human contact with the character. Perhaps even more cautious than Tim Lippe, Ronald Wilkes reveals in his cups that his life isn’t all insurance selling – ‘I’m into antiquing and community theatre, and I’m quite a fan of the HBO series The Wire‘. Isiah Whitlock Jr is mostly happy to play straight man to Helms and Reilly. He gets his reward in the one sequence that is otherwise badly off-key. Greviously disillusioned by the truth about insurance men, Tim goes to a drink-and-drugs party, staged by Miguel Arteta in a way that’s unpleasantly dismissive of the low-lifes who turn nasty. Ronald arrives and saves Tim’s bacon: combining his theatre and television interests, he does an impression of a heavy from The Wire which reduces everyone to submissive silence. (I missed the joke really – I didn’t realise Isiah Whitlock Jr is in The Wire.)
Miguel Arteta and the scenarist Phil Johnston certainly overdo Tim’s conservative timidity. Arriving at the conference venue, he’s approached by a hooker (Alia Shawkat), who asks for a light. Tim tells her smoking’s bad for you but offers her a piece of butterscotch. He has a credit card but plans to pay his way with traveller’s cheques. In the hotel bar, he explains that he doesn’t drink but he eventually agrees to a cream sherry. Yet because Arteta and Johnston see anything involving sex as potentially comically ridiculous Tim, at the start of the film, is having an affair with the woman who was once his primary school teacher, name of Marcy Vanderhei. I realise this is meant to show he’s a mother’s boy-man: the contrast between Helms’s clumsy enthusiasm and Sigourney Weaver’s sexy nonchalance as Marcy is amusing at first. So is Tim’s latest love gift to Marcy, a knitted scarlet tanager, the kind of thing a middle-class eight year old might give his teacher for Christmas. But – good as it is to see Sigourney Weaver having fun – it’s too quickly incredible that a woman like Marcy would share her bed, however temporarily, with someone like Tim Lippe. (The arrangement also undermines his naïvete.) It’s silly too when, at the convention, he explains to Dean that he’s not interested in other women because he’s ‘pre-engaged’. (Although Dean’s response to Tim’s picture of Marcy – ‘Why are you showing me a photo of your mom? I mean, she’s hot but …’ – is good.)
The main woman in the film is Joan Ostrowski-Fox (the names really are good). She is another conference delegate and well played by Anne Heche. I liked how Arteta got across, especially in this character, the convention as a closed world – a few days that are detachable from the rest of the participants’ year. The one point at which a British remake might be preferable is when Tim – with the help and support of Dean, Ronald and Joan – scores his big moral victory by speaking his mind and exposing the fraudulence of the convention bigwig (Kurtwood Smith) and his own boss (Stephen Root). This is mechanically heartwarming but at least Miguel Arteta recovers his balance in time for the closing credits, which feature excellent flash-forward inserts to the main quartet’s promotional video for the company they’ve set up together. Cedar Rapids put me in a good mood.
5 May 2011
