Wanderlust: A Strange Experiment in Comedy Gone..eh, Just Sorta Wrong

The latest film from Director David Wain (Role Models) is the cinematic version of a comedic piñata: on the one hand there are several moments that are hilarious and comedic gold both for their unique spin on familiar circumstances and their effective use of a strong cast serving as the deliciously sweet brand name morsels our dentists love to hate.  On the other hand, there are countless overly-bizarre, thoroughly cringe-inducing moments littered liberally throughout the rest of the film that simply boggle the mind resembling those  rotten apples, razor blades, and a coffee-stained 1987 copy of Reader’s Digest featuring an abridged version of the failed Dolph Lundgren home improvement book, Whatever he Touches, He Destroys.

Premise: Rattled by sudden unemployment, a Manhattan couple surveys alternative living options, ultimately deciding to experiment with living on a rural commune where free love rules. Result: A comedy experiment that rests uneasily somewhere between somewhat funny, inconclusive and unwatchable.

The premise of this film rests on a couple that has gotten a raw end of the deal of life.  After a moderately humorous interaction with a realtor and the cautious purchase of the world’s smallest studio in Manhattan, the two find their lives unraveling: Linda (Jennifer Aniston) delivers one of the most awkward and poorly-received documentary pitches to some HBO executives since Kevin Costner pitched Dances with Pedophiles; and her husband George’s (Paul Rudd) bonus is put on hold after the firm is suddenly brought down on unnamed but clearly numerous fraud charges.

Out on the street and broke, George turns to the world’s worst human being slash brother Rick (Ken Marino) who is about as nurturing as a Mama Ann Coulter eating her snake young alive. On their journey from NYC to Atlanta to live with Satan himself, they accidentally stumble on a strange commune of even stranger people ranging from a nudist to the outright insane. However, on the fate-full night, the two grow closer, let go, and feel more alive than ever before.  When their visit with Rick and his wife Marissa (Michaela Watkins) turns out to be a hysterical, but short-lived disaster, the two flee in terror back to the commune.  And then, the true madness begins.

Essentially, the rest of the film follows two competing plotlines: George and Linda’s relationship as tested by the lunacy of the commune and the cliché “Save the Commune” storyline which does about as much as you would expect (note: as a reminder, you expected nothing). The main storyline, however, offers us that mixed bag of humor and horror referenced earlier: there are several laugh-out-loud moments that cannot be overlooked.  Of course there are more moments where sweet death cannot come soon enough.

Essentially, Wain’s style is to turn this film and its content into an absolute playground where anything goes…literally anything.  These people are so far off the deep end that the life guards have left them for drowned or eaten by fresh water pool sharks.  There is Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio),the nudist writing a pointless novel and producing his own wine; there is former porn-star, super bitch Karen (Kathryn Hahn); there is the too-much-acid-in-the-70s Carvin (Alan Alda), the creeping super-hippy Seth (Justin Theroux), the preggers lady Almond (Lauren Ambrose) and the list goes on and on. 

While Wain is able to squeeze some fresh new fun from this potentially stale formula, more often than not, audiences will long for the cliché. Time after time observers will be mortified with embarrassment for the characters on screen which does itself offer some of that trademark what passes for humor these days; however, far too frequently, there are gags which just don’t make any sense at all, based on completely odd-ball elements which are more confusing than anything else. 

Apparently, Wain’s objective is to fill every moment of this film with a joke.  Ultimately, most of them are either tired, not funny, or delivered to such extremes as to snuff out the comedy long before the bit is even over.  Like a comedy workshop gone awry, this film needed more editing, less eccentricity, and more Prozac.

The acting in the film, however, is of high quality, so if such an experiment were to be had, Wain, at least, armed himself with actors that could deliver.  Rudd and Aniston always have chemistry and both are quite fantastic in their roles.  While Rudd in particular suffers some at the hands of the script and the goofy antics, he and Aniston are very funny and very believable.  Theroux is typically quite funny and also manages to effectively communicate his intense desire for Anniston with only his eyes and body language, an impressive feat of control. 

Marino and Watkins are likely the most consistently hysterical characters in this film, grounded in the sad reality which is their absurd, sad, repressed lives, and never being forced to confront the Eden meets Narnia meets Circus Sideshow that is the commune.  Both deliver their lines perfectly and ensure that attention is always on them.  It would have been almost nicer to see a movie about them…or at least Watkins. 

Hahn, essentially reprising her role as the hippy-villainess in Our Idiot Brother, manages to make this character angrier and more annoying than even that endeavor. Of course, in her defense, that seems to be exactly what Wain intended. Alda, on the other hand, has taken a step back from his usual brilliance; his performance is a bit disappointing since it lacked the nuance and depth that he normally brings to roles.  Instead, audiences will gaze upon him, eyes-glazed, every time the script forces him to utter some line we forgot before it happened.

Overall, Wanderlust is 40-45% fun with the rest languishing somewhere between boring and unwatchable.  While it sometimes successfully pokes fun at Hippies, it tends to feel overly reductive and the characters seem more like caricatures. Fortunately, the funny parts (especially the scenes with Marino and Watkins) lift the movie just enough to keep it from feeling like a waste of time. And I will also applaud Wain for making a relatively unique film with a lot of experimental attempts in comedy; but a word of advice – audiences typically don’t like to feel like lab rats, especially when the cheese being offered tastes like “Huh?” and “I want my Money Back.”

Rating: 6 – A mediocre Prosecco that a cute bartender served you