Eat Wheaties! Tony Hale Can’t Save Lame Effort With Less Comic Fibre and Extra Cringe

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

With all the admiration and affection he has earned for his great character work on the television series Arrested Development and Veep, you hope for the best for Tony Hale in a starring role. He gets his turn to shine in Eat Wheaties!, the debut film from Canadian writer/director Scott Abramovitch in a story adapted from a 2003 epistolary comic novel, The Locklear Letters.

Hale, who also executive produced the film, plays Sid Straw, a middle-aged, socially awkward cubicle drone with a sad moustache who works in a sales office in Scottsdale, Arizona. One day Sid is excited to receive an invitation to a University of Pennsylvania college reunion.

As part of the planning committee, he’s obliged to join Facebook for the first time and begins discovering old college friends. Among them is a former classmate and acquaintance, the real-life actress Elizabeth Banks. Sid begins posting on her fan page, reminiscing about their time together and her supposed inspirational catchphrase, “Eat Wheaties!”

A tolerance for stalker comedies tends to be a personal matter, as they tap-dance on the crack between eccentric and unwell. I put Chilly Scenes of Winter and The King of Comedy in my good books, but I don’t share the love for What About Bob? or The Cable Guy.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

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He makes a dumb racial joke to an African American colleague (“I bet you like your coffee strong and Black!”) and keeps pestering his contemptuous receptionist (Sarah Goldberg) about why his office mail keeps going astray. At his brother’s birthday, he holds the floor in a self-indulgent toast that nobody wants to hear.

His pregnant sister-in-law (Elisha Cuthbert) resents him for ruining her wedding while brother Tom insists that Sid is basically a good guy who just tries too hard. The vibe we get is somewhat different: Sid has a couple of dates with a pleasant age-appropriate woman, Kate (Sarah Burns) but she bails. He just seems too self-absorbed to pick up basic social cues.

Alone again, Sid keeps boasting about his acquaintance with Elizabeth Banks, and keeps posting on her fan page, without realizing everyone can see his long personal messages. Unexpectedly, Banks’ snooty agent (Sarah Chalke) slaps him with a restraining order, an improbable turn that trivializes the reality of cyber-stalking. The social attention sets off a chain of negative consequences in Sid’s life, finally earning Sid some sympathy. Sure, he’s clueless but the public shaming and punishment is disproportionate.

While little of this is funny, there’s a support team of good comic actors help keep it from sinking to the level of maudlin. Among them are Alan Tudyk as Sid’s passive-aggressive semi-friend. The stand-out here is the pillowy Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) as the cut-rate lawyer Sid hires to lift the restraining order. As for Ms. Banks, no spoilers, but can you actually imagine the sunny star abetting gratuitous social cruelty?

Eat Wheaties! Directed by Scott Abramovitch. Starring Tony Hale, Elisha Cuthbert, Paul Walter Hauser, David Walton, Sarah Chalke and Alan Tudyk. Available on video on demand from May 4.