The film opens at UMart ““ a fictionalized Kmart ““ where Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) spends each work day chatting with customers, mentoring his less efficient peers and picking up trash in the parking lot.
Larry Crowne is the employee whom other dedicated, hard working employees want to be and whom slackers want to hate but can’t because he is so nice. Basically, he is perfect and, possibly, a man without flaws. That is not a compliment ““ perfection is rarely interesting.
Hanks’ character is set up as a hardworking everyman who has run into a stretch of horrible luck courtesy of the economic recession. He is fired by comically inept superiors because UMart is cutting back. His lack of a college degree (he joined the navy right out of high school) makes him a prime target.
After a fruitless job search, Crowne enrolls in the local community college to ensure he is never unceremoniously laid off again. There he makes friends with classmates, joins a scooter gang (like a motorcycle gang, but less cool) and falls for his speech teacher Mrs. Tainot, played by a very dour Julia Roberts.
At home, Crowne has to make increasingly difficult financial decisions as the bills begin to pile up. He takes a job as a cook at a friend’s diner and downsizes his car (hence the scooter) and later his house.
His mantra throughout the movie is that everyone, including himself, is falling on hard times. And while this film is about surviving during a recession, the situation never seems dire. At times when mere mortals would probably cry, throw a fit or even just curse under their breath, Crowne simply stares with a furrowed brow for a few moments. He might sigh if the situation is really serious.
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself, pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” seems to be the message of the movie. The concept is valid and one that could have added heart to the movie. But “Larry Crowne” would have been just as stagnant if Crowne had been wailing in the streets for an hour and 38 minutes.
The problem is, again, that there is no growth. Crowne doesn’t have to work hard to come to any realizations, and therefore doesn’t inspire anyone. The film is about a man reinventing himself, but Crowne is as perfect and dull during the closing scene as he was when the film started.
In general, “Larry Crowne” fails to reach its potential. The casting is good, the acting is good and the film even has a few interesting quirks. The scooter gang, led by “That ’70s Show” veteran Wilder Valderrama, represented a funny twist on a stereotypical biker gang.
The only part of the film that works well is the classroom dynamic within the community college. Like the NBC show “Community,” it pairs strong and seemingly incompatible personality types together and forces them to cooperate. Here the one-dimensional nature of the characters works, leading to some of the few jokes in the film that aren’t cringe-worthy.
The students get along despite their professor’s ability to suck all the positivity out of a room. Tainot is a dry and unapproachable woman who seems to have lost whatever passion she had for teaching years before the start of the movie.
At one point, Tainot wonders if she is making any sort of difference in the lives of her students. It almost makes the viewer wonder whether the cynicism or the passionless students came first.
Figuring out why a glass half empty type of woman like Tainot would fall for a glass half full guy like Crowne, or vice versa, defies imagination, and the film does nothing to help solve the mystery of their attraction. “Larry Crowne” is a romantic comedy, but it was rarely funny and never romantic.
Ignoring everything else, a romantic comedy should make the audience want to root for the couple, even if the viewer knows their love is inevitable. This film couldn’t end soon enough.
Email John at ajohn@media.ucla.edu.