Two-Cent Review: "Wanderlust"

**original release date: 2/24/2012**

Comedies are a crap-shoot to begin with.  Making a comedy about hitting rock bottom is even more difficult for the most part.  If you are to make a comedy about hitting rock bottom, and you're not willing to make it darkly humorous, you're going to have a problem in the end.

Such is the case with "Wanderlust".  The movie is true to life in many ways, but it doesn't have the courage to go as dark as it needs to be to find any kind of relatabilty with its audience.

George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) just bought a new loft apartment in New York City.  However, when Linda fails to sell her documentary about penguins with testicular cancer to HBO and George's company has now gone belly up thanks to the Feds doing an investigation on the owner of the company, George and Linda find themselves unemployed.

While on their way to Atlanta to stay with George's brother Rick (Ken Marino) and sister-in-law Marissa (Michaela Watkins), George and Linda stumble upon Elysium, a bizarre hippie commune where free love and anti-government sentiments roam free. George falls in love the place immediately, as well as the local color -- such as the absent-minded owner Carvin (Alan Alda), the stereotypical hippie Seth (Justin Theroux) whose literally still stuck in the 80s, and the nudist (Joe Lo Truglio) who makes his own wine and is working on his first novel.

Soon after deciding to stay, Linda starts falling for Seth, and George begins to yearn for the pleasures of the capitalist world he came from.  Hilarity, of course, ensues...sometimes.

Director David Wain, who co-wrote the script with Ken Marino (both from "Role Models"), tried to recapture the fairly light-hearted funny that "Role Models" was.  However, when the subject matter of the comedy is so close to home, light-hearted didn't quite cut it.

The main problem with "Wanderlust" is not just the fact it didn't go dark enough, but the characters really aren't that respectable.  George and Linda are tremendous hypocrites about what their core values are.  Seth is willing to sell out his friends for a Klondike bar.  Marissa stays in an emotionally abusive relationship with Rick, whose cheating on her, by being an alcoholic.  The movie, at a feels-too-long-sometimes 98 minutes, has some laughs here and there, but not enough to hold it in any high regard.

MY TWO CENTS:  "Wanderlust" tries to wander into the realm of "Role Models" and "Knocked Up", but doesn't quite make the grade.  As funny as Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston are in the film, it doesn't change the fact that it's a film that almost gets there.  And this is one of the times that almost doesn't cut it.