In all honesty I went to this movie simply because it fit nicely into a timeslot for one of my Friday movie binges. I had no idea what it was about, even, as the marketing was rather poor for it, but in the end going in blind helped me enjoy it much more.
Cedar Rapids contains some of the quirks necessary to make movies truly special, but ends up being just fun. The way the mundane lives of insurance salesmen are elevated to interesting and comical by a simple yearly trip to an insurance convention is a nice injection of ordinary living in much the same vein as Juno, but without the shitty score.
It worries that me that Ed Helms, who plays insurance salesman Tim Lippe, might end up typecasting himself in the long run. This particular character is more similar to Helms’s role as Stu Price in The Hangover than I was comfortable with at first. Once the movie really gets going, however, it becomes easy to see that regardless of who played Lippe, the goofy naïveté the character provided would be necessary for the movie to work.
The rest of the supporting cast is very unique because it is comprised of John C. Reilly, Bunk from The Wire, and the chick that Ellen turned straight again. Reilly is also in typical form as Dean Ziegler, dragging the others regularly into hijinks that upset convention president Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). Ronald Wilkes (Whitlock Jr.) is Ziegler’s foil, while the seductive Joan (Heche) helps contribute to the maturation of Lippe.
The best part about this movie is its simplicity, evidenced both by the single-shot camera usage and how unflattering Sigourney Weaver looks in lingerie. In fact there’s a decent amount of half-nudity in Cedar Rapids, as both Helms and Reilly spend a noticeable chunk of time in their underwear, including a steamy pool scene with Heche.
Overall Cedar Rapids is a fun movie about small town life and coming of age very, very, very late in life. It’s most definitely worth a watch, but the need to see it in theaters isn’t there, so it’s going to get a qualified score.
Rating: 7/10.
