Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd star in 'Wanderlust'. (Handout)
Here's the no-brainer comedy litmus test. If most or all of the audience laughs, it's funny. If I laugh and nobody else does, it's still funny. If we all agree, bonus.
Judging by a recent screening, the hilariously scattershot Wanderlust -- in which Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston play a stressed-out New York couple who end up in a New Age-y, free-love Georgia commune -- falls in the latter category.
It's also a pleasant surprise, since I must confess I'd become conditioned not to expect much from a Jennifer Aniston movie.
Directed by David Wain (Role Models) and produced by Judd Apatow, Wanderlust is a slight story that fronts a barrage of low-flying funny-'cause-it's-true gags and dementedly-improvised nuttery. Subjects include sardine-can urban real estate (Rudd's and Aniston's characters open the movie with the purchase of a closet-sized "micro-loft" in the West Village, a hobbit-hole that is ripe for physical comedy) and suburbia (Rudd has a jerk brother in Atlanta whose desperate-housewife spouse gets by on mimosas in the morning and margaritas in the afternoon, and talks blandly about her anguish the way one might the weather).
Caught between these two existential hells, Linda and George escape into Elysium, a commune started in 1971 by a now-befuddled old hippie (Alan Alda). It has morphed over the years into a cult-like "intentional community" run by a vaguely-sinister gobbledygook-spouting alpha male named Seth (Justin Theroux). But its open concept, spontaneous guitar-and-didgeridoo pot-smoking parties, back-to-nature sessions with aboriginal psychotropic herbs ("it's like peyote, only stronger") and ritual-hugs hit the frazzled couple like a cold drink on a hot day.
Elysium also provides Team Apatow with fertile ground for what it does best -- create deranged character templates and improvise them to death. There are jokes that are beaten into the ground (you could make a drinking game out of the number of times Alda's character recites the commune's original membership), and others that are sublimely out there. Among them: Joe Lo Truglio as a nudist winemaker (who wears a codpiece when stomping on the grapes to keep pubes out of the product) and wannabe author (Apatow has promised, only half-jokingly, that he will never make a movie without an exposed penis).
But it's Rudd's ill-fit with commune life that really gives Wanderlust its comedic glue. A scene where he sits on a toilet while commune members stroll in and casually engage him in conversation is great guilty lowbrow humour. Given his wife's permission to share in the free-love experience (with eager hippie sexpot Malin Akerman), George gives himself an inept "talk-dirty" pep talk in the mirror that flies off into a steam of rude non-sequiturs.
This is not a movie where you go to enjoy the narrative. The plot is simply: George is into commune life, then he's not, Linda is not, then she is. There's some stuff about a developer's plans for a casino on the property, but it's a contrivance that stands out like a sore-thumb in an otherwise free-wheeling comedy.
