Movie Review: Cedar Rapids

I expend a lot of critical chutzpah on the painfully-obvious art-blindness of contemporary North American Protestant Evangelical (NAPE) "culture," so I think it's fair that I take a break from time to time to launch a few missive missiles in the other direction.

I have mentioned on my personal blog the poor artistic form shown in the way Christians were caricatured in the film Easy A, and last night I watched another rave-reviewed picture that takes that caricaturization to another level. In Cedar Rapids, a well-behaved, small-town insurance agent named Tim Lippe (perfectly played by Ed Helms) goes to the "big city" of Cedar Rapids, Iowa to represent his company at an annual insurance convention. Lippe is a repressed, anxious fellow, paralysed by fear of failure.

This is a problem, of course, and one that is solved over the course of the film as Lippe learns to think for himself, loosen up, and take ownership of his own life. He accomplishes this by befriending a prostitute, doing a cocktail of drugs, getting in a fight, sleeping with a married woman, and finally seeing past the hypocricy of his vocally "Christian" employer and the loudly "Christian" dink who presides over the convention. 

Now, I'm not gonna nit-pick Lippe's decisions. Befriending prostitutes is the sort of thing Jesus Christ actually did, after all, and sometimes you have to do something dumb (like going to a house party with strangers after smoking unknown substances) to know why being smart is better. The problem I have with this film is not that I didn't buy the importance of Lippe's journey or the choices he makes, it's a few of the unsettling moral assumptions underlying the story. 

A good story is honest, and people honestly do a lot of dumb things, which is one of the reasons why this qualifies as a good story. But a story can be good as a story and still be a few sandwiches short of a moral picnic, because the moral value of a tale comes not from what the characters do, but what the film says about the relative moral worth of those actions. While Cedar Rapids does show the negative consequences of Lippe's drug-spree, the adultery he engages in is seen as a perfectly healthy, harmless activity, and his feelings of remorse are mocked as childish and stupid. 

Article Author: joshbarkey

Josh Barkey was raised in the Amazon basin of Peru, South America, and eventually attained the rank of "Man for Life" in the Canadian wilderness. These days he lives in a shed in North Carolina, teaching art and in his free time arranging words into …

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