Cedar Rapids

Directed by Miguel Arteta

(R)

***

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In this “clever, tender comedy,” The Office’s Ed Helms “brings wide-eyed uncool” to his role as a prototypical innocent hitting the big city, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. In this case, the big city is Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Helms is a sheltered insurance salesman forced during his maiden out-of-town trip to room with a handful of morally challenged fellow conventioneers, played by John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. It’s never clear if the film means to “make cruel sport” of its small-time hell-raisers or if it’s “laughing along with” these “flawed but human characters,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. That tension actually “drives the movie.” What makes Cedar Rapids so original as a comedy is that it “takes time to appreciate the disarming power of sincerity,” said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Helms’s Tim Lippe is “a man who sticks to his values not because he’s a rube, and not because his ‘unworldliness’ makes the character funnier to sophisticates in the audience, but because that’s what a good man does.”