FILM: Cedar Rapids

Candide sells insurance.

Ed Helms, dry wry denizen of “The John Stewart Show”, stars as “man-child” naïf Wisconsin insurance agent Bill Lippe (rhymes with sippy, dippy) sent to the big city for the convention. When we meet him, he’s a needy, nice nerd living a juvenile fantasy by having an affair with his seventh-grade teacher, played by Sigourney Weaver.  Her leave-taking of him is kind, knowing, and very funny – about the only fuzzy moment of this queasy, scowling comedy.

Lippe isn’t even an anti-hero, just a Midwestern rube Candide; his mental condom is a result of loss of his parents at an early age. His appointment with adulthood is set in a city recently flooded by its curving prairie river, value restored by the insurance policies wisely purchased by all (his view of the product he sells so sincerely). He bumbles into reality, reminding me of Tom Hanks state-of-wonder characters, gone a bit awry.

John C. Reilly, his roommate,  “Deansie”, is a braying, boorish, foul-speaking vulgarian with a heart of gold underneath all that cinematically fashionable raunch bleu.  Anne Heche, a delicate redhead, becomes his erotic muse-duenna, ushering him into sexual adulthood and then helping him down easy when the disillusioning crash comes.

Ronald Wilkes (starring in “The Wire”) plays the third roommate – is he the first black man Lippe has ever seen? as a race-neutral nice business guy antithesis of his corrupt Senator role on TV.  The script deftly nods to this character as he “saves” his Musketeers from meth-heads at a party Lippe has stumbled into.

Orin (get it?) Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith) is the hypocritical Babbitt president of the insurance association, sending up and exposing the bullying tactics of the Christian right and the way it buddies up with Horatio Alger/Ayn Rand philosophy.  A brilliant locker room scene that registers Am-I-seeing-this shock –reveals the emperor-has-no-clothes smutch reality as the just-showered Lippe encounters the toga-draped president in the flesh.

Lippe does stand-up right thing at the end of the film: he whistle-blows, rats-out, revealing the bribery and petty payola scheme that was going on.  It’s not such a wonderful life, but that’s what he’s got.   

Does  screenwriter Phil Johnson’s edgy perspective really like this world as much as “Fargo” did? Not for me – an Iowa-born Wisconsin-raised product, I squirmed at being called “corn-fed” living in California – I think it’s a roughly faceted gem of ambivalence that mourns and scorns the possession of innocence in a dirty world.