Movie Box Review

LARRY CROWNE:  Watch It At Home - Giant Stars/Tiny Ambitions

Allow me to play Nostradamus for a moment.  the day will come--and it's not far off--when you'll be sitting in front of your TV set, remote in hand (or maybe you'll be looking at your online streaming site, the vision is a little blurry).  In any case, you'll be going through the available titles, and among them will be LARRY CROWNE.  Oh that one, you'll think:  with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.  You'd sorta thought of seeing that.  So you'll turn it on, and for 99 minutes, you'll chuckle a little bit, you'll feel moderately good when (spoiler alert) the stars fall for each other, and more than once you'll find your attention drifting and have to direct it back to the screen.  When it's over, you'll think:  that wasn't so bad.  And half an hour later, if someone asks you what you've watched lately, you'll have a hard time even remembering the title.

Larry Crowne is unfailingly, even insistently, amiable and positive, and yet there's something hollow about it.  It's clearly a project that Tom Hanks cares about passionately--he's not just the star, he co-wrote the script (with My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardarlos), serves as one of the producers, and chose it as his first feature directing vehicle since That Thing You Do! in 1996--but none of that passion shows itself on screen.   He's telling the story of a middle-aged man who finds that losing his job and attending classes at a community college brings him new, young, vibrant friends (including Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wilmer Valderrama), true love (with guess who) and a renewed commitment to life; the movie feels like it could have been made by George Clooney's character in Up In the Air for the scene where he convinces J.K. Simmons that downsizing can be a good thing. 

As a filmmaker, Hanks is professional enough, but he showed more of an eye, more sense for pacing and rhythm, and certainly more interest in performance detail, in That Thing You Do! 15 years ago.  Larry Crowne's supporting cast, which also includes George Takei, Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson and Bryan Cranston, play sitcom level characters, and the plotting by Hanks and Vardarlos is lazily slack.

When Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts want to charm you, goddamn it, they're going to do it, so Larry Crowne is enjoyable enough in its negligible, disposable way.  No one does bumbling good-heartedness or sudden the-sun-just-came-out! grins like Hanks and Roberts.  But these are parts that could have been filled just as well by Peter Krause and Julie Bowen; and really, Krause and Bowen might have brought more reality to the story than these people who've been mega-stars for more than 20 years. There's a sense in which watching Hanks and Roberts play "ordinary people" is like an all-star episode of Undercover Boss--Hanks and Roberts have done so many movies from inside their movie-star bubble, with no relation to real life, that for them, "ordinary" is a character part.  

That, I think, is why there's something slightly smug and complacent about Larry Crowne.  It was one thing when Hanks portrayed the music world in That Thing You Do! as a glossy fantasy of the 1960s, because his protagonists were young and new to stardom.  But middle-aged men who lose their jobs, and in the case of Roberts' character, women who are unsatisfied by their professions and stuck in lousy marriages, recognize their own pain.  That's a pain Hanks doesn't care to acknowledge, so Larry Crowne barely misses a step on his way to fulfillment.  Consequently, his serenity feels easy and unearned.  Larry Crowne was made by tycoons who don't even know how out of touch they are; it's entertainment for the little people.

When the original Scream arrived in 1996, the slaughtering-the-teenagers genre was already old enough to drive; the first Friday the 13th had opened more than 16 years before.  The conventions of the form were as well-worn and predictable as a John Wayne western.  Writer Kevin Williamson had the ingenious notion of incorporating this ennui into the picture itself, and the result, under Wes Craven's direction, was a thriller that felt smarter, fresher and funnier than its counterparts.  A 3-picture franchise followed that grossed hundreds of millions for Dimension (the more profitable, less glamorous brother company to Miramax at the time, run by Harvey Weinstein's brother Bob--now Dimension is similarly part of The Weinstein Company).  To everyone's credit, they all let the series go away when the grosses and quality had only started to dip, rather than waiting until they'd sucked it dry.

But now 10 years have passed, and Dimension could use a hit franchise (Piranha 3D isn't quite it).  So could Craven, whose last picture was the dismal 3D My Soul To Take.  And let's face it, Neve Campbell hasn't been crowding the multiplex marquees lately.   And "Scream" is still very much a brand name, as its grosses will likely prove at least on Friday night.  So:  SCRE4M (yeah, I hate the gimmicky spelling too, but that really is the official title).  

 

Williamson is again the writer--although stories indicate he's been somewhat rewritten--and true to form, the passage of time and decline in the horror genre have been written into the script.  (Although you won't find anything about a studio, director and star needing new hits.)  Sidney Prescott (Campbell) has come home to 

Woodsboro, where dumb Dewey (David Arquette) is still sheriff and married to still-ambitious Gale (Courtney Cox).  Since the movie needs--very literally--new blood, we also get a fresh shipment of teens, including Sidney's niece Jill (Emma Roberts), and others played by Hayden Panettiere, Marielle Jaffe, Rory Culkin, Nico Tortorella, and Erik Knudsen; other vict--I mean characters, are Sidney's aunt (Mary McDonnell) and publicist (Allison Brie) and various cops (Adam Brody, Marley Shelton, Anthony Anderson).  It's the 10th anniversary of the original Woodsboro killings, which in the "Scream" universe have been the subject of 7 "Stab" movies and several books, and now Sidney herself has written a book about her survival.  Once she's back in town... who'da thought it?  Ghostface is back to slaughtering, and the cast starts bleeding out.

 

The problem with Scre4m is that it's so wound up in its anti-mythology that it's become as creaky, as frozen in its conventions, as the horror movies it parodied.  So if I tell you that actresses like Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, Aimee Teegarden, Brittany Robertson and Shanae Grimes are sighted in the first 10 minutes, do I really have to tell you anything more about their roles?  And sure, the picture structures its opening to acknowledge that fact, but that doesn't make it less predictable.  The brick wall the series hits is that you can make fun all you like about the stupid things characters do to get themselves killed in slasher movies, but then if you want to kill your characters, they have to do the same dumb things.  And although Craven does his professional stuff, it's obvious that an empty space in the frame will inevitably be filled by some sudden shape (whether killer or false shock), a diminution in music will mean a loud noise or crashing musical chord is coming, and the revelation that nothing is behind you just means that it's in front of you.  There are endless meta-jokes about sequels, remakes and reboots, not many of them funny (although oddly, there isn't a single gag about 3D horror flicks), as well as references to webcams, texting, social networking, and all those other newfangled things that the kids do nowadays; it's like Williamson had a checklist. 

The picture does come to life in its last 15 minutes, but I really would be spoiling the fun if I described it at all, so you'll just have to take my word.  Suffice it to say that the performer who gets to play a prominent part in those sequences acquits him or herself extremely well, sparking that whole section with killer timing and (very) physical humor.  By then, though, you'd be excused for thinking that the next picture in the series might as well be called "Ya5n".     

(SCRE4M - Dimension/Weinstein Company - 112 min. - R - Director:  Wes Craven - Script:  Kevin Williamson - Cast:  Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Emma Roberts, Hayden Pannetiere, Rory Culkin, Marley Shelton - Wide Release)