Cinefile

Ed Helms (The Hangover, TV's The Office) has the movie nice guy routine down pat. From the conservative wardrobe to his screen characters' always-non-judgmental demeanor, Helms manages to make every "ordinary guy" he plays come across as both believable and always vulnerable to danger. In Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids, Helms plays Tim Lipee, an insurance sales agent for Wisconsin's Brown Star Insurance and the thesp fits the bill perfectly. From his positive outlook on his community to his tight-lipped sexual service to his older, former school teacher Macy Vanderhei (the always welcomed Sigourney Weaver), Lippe's universe remains faithfully intact--so long as the agents circling around his aura of existence keep to their roles. But when the unexpected death of Brown Star's hottest sales agent (an uncredited Thomas Lennon) comes along, Lippe's controlled environment (quietly) goes off-kilter; his boss Bill Krogstad (Office Space's Stephen Root) decides to send Lippe as the Brown Star sales representative to the much-feared annual insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Now, although Cedar Rapids takes place mostly in the Iowa hotel where the convention takes place, it works almost like a road movie. That's because the architecture, temperature, personality and spontaneity of this setting provides Lippe with a crash tour of an alternate state of being. Throw in some colorful characters like his assigned roommate Ronald Wilkes (The Wire's Isiah Whitlock, Jr. -- sans the "sheeeeeeeeeeet"), the sexy Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche) and Stevens Point's notorious Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly, on fire like always), and Lippe has his work cut out for him. It's not that these loose cannon individuals are bad people--it's just that Lippe is used to micromanaging the elements around him and if he's ever to win that elusive Two Diamond insurance award for Brown Star…well, you know.

As a straight comedy, Cedar Rapids supplies a surprising amount of raunchy, potty-mouthed humor (almost all of it thanks to Reilly) and Helms' The Hangover element should draw in the appropriate pools of fans. The wildcard of this film comes ironically in the producing hands of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Oscar-winning scribes behind Sideways and About Schmidt). The films that Payne and Taylor create are sublime because they play the comedy for what it is: tragic. Here, under Arteta's direction, Cedar Rapids has the music, palette and scope of a stronger Alexander Payne film but it ends up playing it safe for the sake of having more commercial appeal. So what happens is we're stuck with a movie full of likable characters, a so-so plot and a whole lot of heart. It's not a great film or a great comedy. But as a lighter attempt from seasoned pros, it's a harmless 90 minutes, landing somewhere between gutter humor and gravitas storytelling. Though for Lippe, it's an exotic and lifechanging trip.