Do a straw poll of your friends and chances are some of them will name Tom Hanks as their favorite actor. Perhaps it’s because he seems to take on roles in films which address the issues affecting our collective psyche. Whether it be in the 2000s when we all suspected some mysterious religious organization was running the world, the 1990s when the Internet began taking over as the dominant medium for pursuing love interests in secret, or the 1980s when people mysteriously aged 20 years after talking to fortunetelling machines. It should come as no surprise then that he’d tackle the financial turmoil still fresh in our minds.
Larry Crowne (Hanks) is an aging employee of the superstore U-Mart who performs his mundane duties with an unnatural amount of glee. Sadly for Larry, “times are tough,” and he loses his job because he never went to college. After a series of calls and interviews gets him nowhere, Larry enrolls in a community college and acquires a scooter as a more cost-effective means of transportation. In between speech classes with the alcoholic, unhappily married professor Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts) and economics lectures with Dr. Ed Matsutani (an offbeat George Takei), Larry rides with a scooter “gang” and improves himself on all fronts.
Tom Hanks pretty much plays the same type in the majority of his films, but even if he’s just a slightly different version of that same “nice guy,” that’s what we all know and love. There’s something different about Larry Crowne though, and overly schmaltzy as it is, it is perhaps knowing that Hanks wrote and directed the film that alters the way we perceive it. Throughout, it feels too close to self-indulgence. The pairing of Hanks and Roberts doesn’t exactly sail along smoothly either and, in truth, it would have been nice to see a rekindling of his onscreen partnership with Meg Ryan.
If you’re up for some harmless entertainment, this is your ticket. Just be prepared to watch Tom Hanks go through the motions. Here’s hoping that he’ll be able to move us again soon, as he’s done so many times before.
