Midwesterners — they’re such weenies!
That’s about all “Cedar Rapids” has to say, but though this mildly amus ing comedy about dorky insurance salesmen hanging around a hotel for a conference is condescending, it isn’t mean-spirited. And Ed Helms makes a fine potato-faced naif, smiling earnestly and wearing a palette of burnt orange and walnut brown.
Helms’ Tim Lippe (rhymes with drippy) is a small-town insurance man from Wisconsin who is sent by his firm to the local sort-of metropolis to compete for an industry award. That honor is meaningless to us, but the movie is really just an excuse for Helms to do a slightly modified 40-year-old-virgin act. OK, he does have a love life — but it’s with the teacher (Sigourney Weaver) who taught him when he was 12. Signing off on a phone call, he tells her, “I’ll dream of you in my heart!”
In Cedar Rapids, Tim fails to recognize that a girl who bums cigarettes outside the hotel entrance is a hooker, recoils in shock when he discovers his roommate is a black man (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and, when made to be social, orders something called “creme sherry” at the bar.
As thinly as this character is written, Helms is gosh-darned cute, and the movie takes on some spark when John C. Reilly shows up as a fellow insurance salesman who demonstrates what a frat boy looks like with an extra 30 years and 50 pounds. Meanwhile, a slinky conference veteran (Anne Heche, doing excellent work) starts flirting up Tim, who discovers that taking home the industry award might mean some ethical dodges that are as foreign to him as Tokyo.
Some of the situations are straight out of some of the more forced episodes of “The Office,” such as a lame talent night and a goofy scavenger hunt dubbed, after the insurers’ association, the ASMI-azing Race. Guys find themselves having urgent discussions in their underwear (cue the door opening at the wrong moment) or trying to assuage each other’s bereavement while nude in the locker room. Whitlock, who so memorably played a politician for sale on “The Wire,” this time plays a starchy, middle-aged Urkel — who says his guilty pleasures include antiquing and doing an impression of the doomed “Wire” antihero Omar.
These corn-fed Rotarians are such a cuddly bunch, and the movie’s barbs are so pudding-soft, that it’s not hard to get caught up in all the gee-whizzery. Maybe the Midwest isn’t actually like this, but if it were, would that be so bad?