Let's say in some alternate reality, Tom Hanks winds up working at a Wal-Mart-style retail chain. Here is how his day goes: He bounds out of his car with a beaming grin, stooping to pick up stray trash in the parking lot.
From afar, he notices a breakable item in danger of falling and strides over to nudge it back to safety on the shelf. Amid giddily greeting customers, he rallies co-workers into a laughing bucket brigade to restock items, turning what should be a dreary job into a game to be savoured.
That is our first glimpse of the title character Hanks plays in Larry Crowne, a timely tale about a man who makes the best of his lot, even when he is downsized out of a job during these hard times and must head back to school to build a new future.
It is all about attitude, says Hanks, getting up each day with the thought that there is action to be had and a party to join into. Hanks, the movie's star, director, producer and co-writer, thinks that is how he would approach life if he were in Larry's place.
"I'd be the gang leader of the common break area. I'd be the guy organising the pinata parties, stuff like that. Absolutely," Hanks, 54, says in an interview for Larry Crowne, which reunites him with his Charlie Wilson's War co-star, Julia Roberts.
"The concept of putting on a show begins as soon as you wake up in the day," Hanks says. "And Larry, the theatre of his life starts when he goes through those doors, and it's like, ‘I'm a team leader, and I'm wearing the red Polo'" — the store employees' uniform. "When Larry picks up trash in the parking lot, that's the first thing he does, because you've got to have a little pride. And I'm a trash picker-upper. What can I tell you?"
A former US Navy cook who never went to college, Hanks' Larry is a model worker at U-Mart, the retailer where he is a perpetual employee of the month. Fifty-something, divorced, with a house worth less than he owes on it, Larry tumbles into an abyss familiar to millions after management lets him go.
He lands part-time work at a diner while taking classes at a community college. Along the way, he fashions a new life for himself, finding romance with his public-speaking teacher (Roberts).
Second chance
"This is a very Tom Hanks movie. This is really how the world should work," says Larry Crowne co-writer Nia Vardalos of Hanks. "A man should get to go to school and get a second chance and get to bag Julia Roberts, in a world according to Tom Hanks."
Larry's situation certainly is not one that Hanks has to worry about. He started out at community college himself — "because of lack of money and drive and wherewithal," Hanks says — but the two-time Academy Award winner has been rich and famous for most of his adult life.
Yet he has built a career as an Everyman who inhabits roles with absolute authenticity, whether it is a lawyer dying of Aids in Philadelphia or a wry, war-weary soldier in Saving Private Ryan, among others.
Sliding into the skin of a workaday guy down on his luck is just another day at the office for Hanks. "Granted, yes, I am a well-known, cheesehead celebrity that has been in front of the cameras for a while, so people do know me," Hanks says. "But part of it is definitely remembering what it was like to be terrified.
"It's not hard for anyone to empathise, I don't think, with a guy who walks in to work one day thinking everything is hunky-dory and then finding out, ‘Sorry, no hard feelings, but you're fired.' I think that's part of the human condition that transcends more than just your station in life."
The idea for Larry Crowne came to him long before the current economic mess, though it gained resonance as Hanks shaped the story and Larry's plight began to reflect what was happening to millions of real people.
Larry's eager approach to classes and the easy, hopeful way he glides into his new routine have their roots in Tom Hanks' school days. "I loved going to school, which is the antithesis of a lot of people. I loved junior high, I loved high school, because there was action there. I never cut a single class of any school I ever went to, because I couldn't imagine that something better was going on somewhere else as opposed to here."
"I went to a school with like, 1,200 kids in one place, and 2,000 kids in another place, and there was a show going on somewhere that I wanted to be a part of in all of that stuff. ... I loved the idea of entering the boundary of that school, in through that cyclone fence, and your job is to make it peppy until 3 o'clock in the afternoon. At least, I always thought that was my job."
Larry's unconvincing
Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around — Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts — it's an especially dispiriting situation.
Hanks, who also directed and co-wrote with Nia Vardalos, has done himself no favours here. Though this story of an ordinary guy's Pygmalion-type makeover after a midlife crisis may sound like it has potential, it plays more like a double-barrelled vanity project than anything worth seeing.
But saddled with a self-inflicted script that presents a character as chipper and gee whiz as Forrest Gump, Hanks' attempts at creating empathy invariably go astray. Hanks' Larry Crowne is introduced as the ultimate company man, an enthusiastic employee of U-Mart who's so devoted to his big-box store job that he cheerfully picks up trash in the parking lot on the way in to work. In years past, the U-Mart nation had recognised Crowne's ardour with numerous employee of the month awards, but not today.
Today our hero, who joined the Navy right out of high school, gets terminated because he doesn't have a college degree. Even in the scene where Crowne gets fired, the bit players onscreen are more involving than he is, and this trend continues with the introduction of neighbours and professional yard-sale merchants Lamar (Cedric the Entertainer) and B'Ella (Taraji P. Henson). Lamar convinces Crowne that he needs an education to be "fire proof," so Crowne buys a fuel-efficient scooter and putt-putts off to East Valley Community College to meet his destiny.
Crowne connects with faculty member Mercedes Tainot (Roberts), who's reluctantly teaching a course in informal public speaking. Though nothing about her performance is inspired, Roberts is most convincing when she treats Crowne and his fellow students with haughty disdain.
It's all for naught, because Larry Crowne's love connection between student and teacher is one of the most unconvincing in memory. Not only is the onscreen chemistry between Hanks and Roberts less than zero, the film's feckless script can't be bothered to come up with a scenario for their getting together that's even a fraction as plausible as Tainot's initial scorn.
If this is the best Hollywood can muster for adult audiences, we're in for a long, hard summer.
— With inputs from Los Angeles Times
