Wanderlust

David Wain’s follow up to his surprisingly strong 2008 film Role Models is amusing but suffers from a neediness that afflicts far too many comedies these days—it’s just too desperate for laughs.  The premise, which involves newly-unemployed yuppies that try life on a hippie commune, is promising, and Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd are good as always, but Wain and co-writer Ken Marino step into every potential puddle possible. The film is overstuffed with characters and scenes that work great on their own but become tiresome at feature length. 

The film also constantly undercuts its own jokes, and funny scenes fail to build on each other like they do in better movies of this ilk.  Wanderlust's best moment, in which Rudd psyches himself up for a long-dreamed-of act of adultery by staring in the mirror and practicing his dirty talk, is riotously funny, but immediately afterwards we see Rudd using those same lines on the actual object of his rehearsal.  Rather than quickly capitalizing on the fantasy-vs.-reality potential of this situation, this second scene kicks the legs out from under the first one by dragging itself out way past a credible length of time. Like many scenes it stops the film’s narrative to indulging in the now-standard Apatovian humor of the awkward and humiliating. Far too many scenes in this film stand out like this—as something to be watched as a stand-alone YouTube clip rather than in the context of the movie.