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 play George and Linda, a married pair of stressed-out Manhattanites who, after George loses his job, travel 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 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. And it’s never difficult to see where Wain’s screenplay is going: These supposedly free spirits at Elysium have plenty of control issues of their own. But Wain peppers the film with goofball characters: Joe Lo Truglio as a nude winemaker; Michalea Watkins as George’s vaguely dippy, margarita-obsessed sister-in-law; Lauren Ambrose, wafting through the movie like an autumn leaf as a pregnant earth mother; Linda Lavin as the steely-eyed real-estate agent who sells George and Linda their New York “microloft.” Wain occasionally resorts to nude bodies for laughs, but he doesn’t have to; there’s enough wit in the writing to squeak “Wanderlust” through. But overall, the movie works more often than it doesn’t, and sometimes that’s enough.
