By snoadmin
David Wain’s “Wanderlust” is a fever dream of a movie, which has some insanely funny laugh-out-loud moments, but has trouble finding its footing when it attempts to be taken seriously.
This is director David Wain’s fourth feature film. He is probably most well-known for directing the cult comedy, “Wet Hot American Summer,” and his more mainstream effort from 2008, “Role Models.” He is also a member of the ’90s MTV sketch comedy troupe “The State,” and the short-lived Comedy Central show “Stella.”
Wain’s background in sketch comedy is important to know when watching “Wanderlust” because the film is basically an excuse to get the talented comedic cast into a series of ridiculous scenes together.
The basic plot involves a couple, George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston), who decide to move into a ridiculously expensive studio apartment in New York City after Linda finishes her documentary film on penguins with testicular cancer. George has an office job, which he hates, and is laid-off when the head of the company is arrested for fraud.
When HBO rejects Linda’s movie and leaves both of them jobless, they are forced to move out of New York and go live with George’s brother Rick (Ken Marino), who gives George a job at his port-a-potty factory. This proves to be too awful for George and Linda to handle, so they drop everything and move into an almost cult-like hippie commune called Elysium, run by guru Seth (Justin Theroux). They are greeted by Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a nudist author, whose constant nudity and giant prosthetic penis becomes a running joke in the film.
What follows is a series of ridiculous events as Linda fully accepts the Elysium lifestyle while George struggles to cope. The characters at the commune are sickeningly free-spirited, refusing to accept the real world and frequently taking hallucinogenic drugs, which lead to some of the funniest scenes in the movie. The drug-trip scenes are when Wain really gets to let his weirdness out, and it makes the rest of the film seem like he’s holding back a bit.
The problems with the film come in the third act when Linda refuses to leave Elysium when George says he’s had enough. The film had not taken itself seriously enough up to that point for it to make sense that Linda would be so accepting of this lifestyle. Besides the two protagonists, there are almost no other characters who seem like they are operating in the real world, so when George and Linda have to make real-life decisions, it’s hard to care. The choice between the overly-cynical claustrophobic New York lifestyle and the free-love drug-addled hippie life doesn’t seem realistic enough to have real meaning.
Fortunately, there are enough laughs along the way for it to be forgivable. The cast is extremely talented, and there is a sense of fun and absurdity that you don’t usually get in a mainstream comedy these days. If this film is successful, it could lead to another David Wain film where he is allowed to be as strange as his previous work has been, which is something worth supporting.
