This amusing family film is heavy on the slapstick and Valuable Life Lessons.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
Viewed from a safe, 10-car-length distance, there’s something inherently silly about traveling in an RV. Who’d want to lug along an entire mobile home, at four miles a gallon or so, when "getting away from it all"?
That quintessentially American absurdity may explain why RV travel has been lampooned so much in the movies. In The Long, Long Trailer, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz spend their honeymoon dragging a mobile home halfway across the country, experiencing considerable wackiness along the way. In Meet the Fockers, the control-freak De Niro character’s RV is his castle, an absurdly tricked-out extension not just of his home but of his work as a CIA agent. And in both the artsy, angsty About Schmidt and Albert Brooks’ brilliantly funny Lost in America, two out-of-work businessmen cope with their mid-life crises by buying RVs instead of sports cars and embarking on road trips.
Both Schmidt and Brooks’ David Howard hope to connect with the people they love. Consciously or unconsciously, they also feel the need to escape from the soul-killing corporate cultures they’ve been immersed in and we all know how you do that in a road-trip movie: you bond with "authentic" Americans. Or, as Howard puts it, "I want to touch Indians!"
RV’s Bob Munro (Robin Williams) is a beleaguered salesman in desperate need of getting back in touch with his family and his core values. ("If you ever want to really find out about yourself," he tells the employees of a small company who have gathered to hear him make a sales pitch, "put your family in an RV and drive.") But this time around, our American cheese is of the processed variety, heavy on the slapstick and the Valuable Life Lessons.
Williams is mercifully subdued, in neither the manic motormouth mode of his early career nor the near-catatonia he rolled out in somber features like Insomnia. Bob is simply, as his boss puts it, "funny and charming," a good and underappreciated man.
The plot is set in motion when he tells his family they’ll be going to Colorado in an RV instead of flying to Hawaii for their much-anticipated vacation. They think he’s changed his mind on a whim, but he’s really fighting for his job. Bob’s icy-hearted boss, who looks like a full-size action figure, is about to give Bob’s job to the weasely colleague who’s been angling for it. His only chance of saving his position is showing up for a sales meeting in Colorado and wowing the people he’s wooing.
Since he doesn’t want his family to know what he’s up to, Bob writes at night, holed up with his laptop in restrooms. During the day, he does the driving and cooking to placate his exasperated wife, Jamie (Cheryl Hines, as pretty much the same sensible-but-sexy sidekick she plays on Curb Your Enthusiasm). He also absorbs endless attitude from his daughter, Cassie (teenage R&B singer JoJo, who looks and acts a lot like Lindsay Lohan), and son, Carl (Josh Hutcherson), who snaps at Bob for "boiling my vibe" when he’s not staring at him in contemptuous silence.
Before the credits roll, of course, the kids learn to respect and appreciate him again, Bob learns that it’s important to tell the truth to your wife and your boss, and the whole family learns that they were wrong to be so quick to judge the happy, wholesome, friendly family they met in an RV park, whose bodacious wife and mother is played by Kristen Chenoweth as a Dolly Parton mini-me.
You know just where this road trip will end up before it even starts. What’s more, most of the jokes aren’t as funny as they could be, a few of the sight gags fall flat, and an extended bit where Bob winds up drenched in waste from the RV’s sewage system is just plain disgusting. But if that sounds dreary, it shouldn’t. RV never for a moment transcends its formula, but it never betrays it either. Both parents and kids should like this consistently amusing fable though nobody’s likely to love it.
RV was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, a talented but uneven director. Sonnenfeld’s best movies are so slick they practically glisten, yet they feel 100 percent man-made, full of heart and wise-ass humor. RV is far from his best work, but it’s also far from his worst. Somewhere between the sophisticated goofiness of Men in Black and Get Shorty and the smarmy insincerity of Wild Wild West, RV rates a solid six out of 10 maybe even a seven on the Sonnenometer.
Rated PG for crude humor, innuendo and language.