Wanderlust

Watching the news lately has been really hard.  So, I took a little break and watched Wanderlust.

In this movie, Paul Rudd plays George.  George is a banker-type in New York who loses his job.  He and his wife, Linda (Jennifer Aniston) leave New York to stay with relatives and end up in a commune.

They stay in a beautiful room and after a pot and sex filled night singing kumbayah around the campfire, "Here is my shirt, man, here we share everything" George and Linda decide to become hippies and join the commune.

Linda falls for everything hook, line and sinker, even going for the "free love."

George figures out pretty quickly that things are not all peachy keen.  In fact, although the rules are that "anything goes" nothing that George does is right.

Hmmm, so the tolerant liberals are completely intolerant of anyone that isn't exactly like them.

Yup.

The man who gives George his shirt, then takes George's car (remember, man, we share everything) and wrecks it with no explanation.

The hippies become enraged when George swats a fly - "that fly has a family!  How can you kill it?!?"  George replies, "Oh, you mean like maggots?"

When talking about their policy of free love, one of the hippies says, "Yeah, people are so heavy, they act like sex has life altering consequences."  Then, she pushes past George with her large, pregnant abdomen.

Alan Alda plays the founder of the commune.  Linda finds him at a local diner eating pounds and pounds of meat.  The commune is vegan.  He has been sneaking away to hork down pounds of pork for over 40 years.  While scarfing his meat snack, he laments to Linda that while he has founded a utopian paradise, he wonders if he missed out in something better.

Hmmmm...

In the end, these selfless, liberal tolerant hippies who share everything, are all going to be abandoned and tossed out on the street by their leader, Seth (Justin Theroux) because he has fallen in love with Linda.  He sells the commune and is going to run away with Linda.  No more sharing for him!

Suddenly, sharing everything isn't so swell when you have something that you really want.  Seth, the pacifist, starts strangling George.

In the end, the married couple, George and Linda leave the commune to continue having a monogamous, capitalist marriage.

The movie is pure genius in the way that it slaughters every single liberal idea and shows that it doesn't work in reality.

It was a nice little bit of sanity for me in this crazy, lunatic world.