David Wain's "Wanderlust" achieves a tricky balance: It has enough laugh-out-loud moments that it wins you over, even though the movie as a whole doesn't add up.
Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston (who first teamed up 13 years ago for "The Object of My Affection") play George and Linda, a married pair of stressed-out Manhattanites who, after George loses his job, travel south to Atlanta hoping to make a fresh start. Staying with George's brother-from-hell (Ken Marino) doesn't work out, but the two find an unexpected alternative: Elysium, a commune (or, as the residents call it, an "intentional community") where rent is cheap and love is free.
Rudd and Aniston are likable as always, though they struggle a bit with characters who don't seem well thought out (both keep switching opinions on how they feel about Elysium, disconcertingly). And it's never difficult to see where Wain's screenplay is going: These supposedly free spirits at Elysium turn out -- ha! -- to have plenty of control issues of their own. (They don't have rules, but they have a required "way of thinking about stuff.")
But Wain, who made the very funny "Role Models" (with Rudd) a few years back, irresistibly peppers the film with goofball secondary characters: Joe Lo Truglio as an earnestly nude winemaker (raising concerns about stomping that you never thought of); Michalea Watkins as George's vaguely dippy, margarita-obsessed sister-in-law; Lauren Ambrose, wafting through the movie like an autumn leaf in the wind as a pregnant earth mother; Linda Lavin as the extremely focused, steely-eyed real-estate agent who sells George and Linda their New York "microloft." (It is very, very micro.)
Wain occasionally resorts to less-than-perfect nude bodies for laughs, but he doesn't have to; there's enough wit in the writing to squeak "Wanderlust" through. You wish he and co-writer Marino had done another draft; you wish Aniston would step out of her comfort zone (as she did, to great effect, in "Horrible Bosses"); you wish Watkins had more screen time and Alan Alda (as the commune's longtime leader) less. But overall, the movie works more often than it doesn't, and sometimes that's just enough.
