Great script helps ‘Cedar Rapids’ succeed
Cedar Rapids
(Cert 15, 83 mins, Comedy/Romance)
Nice guy Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) works for an insurance firm, which has won the coveted Two Diamonds award for excellence in customer service for the past two years thanks to gregarious agent Roger Lemke (Thomas Lennon).
After Roger dies, boss Bill Krogstad (Stephen Root) asks Tim to represent the company at the annual conference where insurance firms compete for the glittering industry standard.
Tim nervously flies to Iowa where he room-shares with lovable Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and party animal Dean Ziegler (John C Reilly).
The men introduce Tim to sassy agent Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche) and to conference leader Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith), who ultimately decides which agency claims top prize. Cedar Rapids is a delightful character study centred on an innocent and caring man, who always sees the good in other people.
First-time feature screenwriter Phil Johnston crafts a menagerie of larger than life figures, whose hilarious misadventures are tethered to raw emotion, from the businesswoman who looks forward to conference season as an escape from her suffocating marriage to the hopeless romantic, who unabashedly tells his current partner: “I dream of you in my heart.”
Helms is adorable in the lead role and the banter with Whitlock Jr, Reilly and Heche is littered with sparkling one-liners, including a messy coupling between Tim and Joan that compels him to confess, “Making love to you was super awesome!”
Tim’s sweetness contrasts with the jaded cynicism of the other characters, gradually shaking them out of their fug and providing the dramatic momentum for the film’s uplifting resolution.
Rating: 4/5.
