LARRY CROWNE directed by Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and Nia Vardalos, with Hanks, Julia Roberts, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Bryan Cranston. An Alliance Films release. 98 minutes. Opens Friday (July 1). See listing. Rating: NN
Larry Crowne seems like such a good idea: Tom Hanks, America’s go-to Everyman, making a movie about a middle-aged Californian who becomes a casualty of the Great Recession and goes back to school to reinvent himself.
Larry Crowne is the first film Hanks has directed since the near-perfect period charmer That Thing You Do! back in 1996. He’s produced plenty of stuff, but nothing’s been able to pull him back behind the camera. So he must really have been passionate about this one, right?
Larry Crowne is precisely the opposite of a passion project. It’s a lazy, sitcommy construction that takes an idea full of potential and does absolutely nothing with it. Every directorial flourish Hanks brought to That Thing You Do! – his generosity with actors, his attention to subtle detail, his sense of time and place – is absent. I wouldn’t say he phoned it in, exactly, but he certainly did an awful lot of delegating.
Larry Crowne offers a millionaire’s view of “regular people” as adorably scrappy bags of quirk – and I’m pretty sure the millionaire in question isn’t Hanks, but co-writer Nia Vardalos, whom he turned into a movie star when he picked up My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Vardalos’s simplistic sense of character and TV-scale plotting skills are all over Larry Crowne. Less concerned with emotional development than with cutting observations about big box stores (they’re so soulless!) and Kids Today (they dress funny and they’re always texting!), the movie stomps so heavily through its contrived paces, you can hear it three screens down the hall.
The script’s half-assed nature also explains Julia Roberts’s off-key performance as the unhappily married speech professor with whom Crowne finds an unexpected connection. Asked to play a character who cannot exist in nature, swinging from “miserable academic” to “wacky drunk” to “radiant Julia Roberts type” as the script requires, she gives up and goes big – grating terribly against Hanks’s low-key presence.
There’s nothing in Larry Crowne that Dan Harmon’s Community doesn’t do faster, funnier and with far more intelligence every Thursday night.
normw@nowtoronto.com
