Features > Movie Reviews > Larry Crowne…

In Up in the Air George Clooney fired strangers with consummate ease but learned to take a personal interest. In The Company Men Ben Affleck swapped a white collar for a blue one. And in Larry Crowne, Tom Hanks goes back to school.

A Walmart employee who is suddenly downsized because he doesn’t have a college degree, Larry runs into money problems when his marriage falls apart… But hey, there’s always Community College.

The affable, only mildly dork Mr Crowne enrolls in an economics class taught by Sulu - yes, George Takei! - and a public speaking class by Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts). He is also adopted by a gang of younger moped-riding bohemians, and in particular by the pretty free spirit, Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who christens him “Lance”, introduces his home to the charms of feng shui, and kits him out in a wardrobe of thrift shop cool.

Fifteen or even ten years ago, Hanks might have romanced Talia – she’s the “manic pixie dream girl” type we see in (500) Days of Summer, Garden State and Yes Man and so many others. But Hanks (who turns 55 July 9th) isn’t about to swap saliva with a girl half his age, no matter what her boyfriend and his teacher assume.

See, Ms Tainot is rather taken with this unassuming but unaccountably attractive middle-aged student. Perhaps because he compares so favourably with her porn-addicted husband (Bryan Cranston, from Breaking Bad).

Directed by Hanks from a script he originated (though it was rewritten by Nia Vardalos, of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame), Larry Crowne doesn’t really stand up as political film, although it certainly adheres to an American ethos of hard work, application and perseverance. Larry may have to give up his big suburban dream home and swap his car for a scooter, but the apartment he rents is pretty as a picture. Likewise, he loses a wife but gains Julia Roberts (I guess that’s a spoiler, if you’ve never seen a movie before in your life).

What it really reminded me of is an anodyne campus comedy, only with middle-aged stars. It’s the kind of rom-com Hanks might have made in the early 80s, without the paunch, the receding hairline and the tranquilized calm he projects here.  Okay, I am being harsh, but there is something deeply patronizing and complacent about this movie that irked me, even if I suspect many people will find it a perfectly innocuous way to kill a couple of hours.

There’s one strikingly angry scene, an inebriated marital bust-up between Julia Roberts and Cranston that seems to have strayed in from a different film entirely, even if Roberts hardly makes a convincing drunk. That apart, she gives a bit of an abrasive edge to this disillusioned teacher that’s welcome in a flick that plays most things too cute and cosy.

It is a comedy? Not really, more of a sentimental drama, a tribute to common decency which might mean more if Hanks had any kind of grasp of what the real world is actually like.