The Oranges: Hugh Laurie as Stifled Suburban Dad

Yeah, all right already, we get it about suburbia: It’s a topography of middle-aged despair hidden under a sunny beige façade. Also: Suburbia’s dark underbelly—it’s so dark! Now maybe Hollywood can finally move on and get to the bottom of those Winnebago-ready KOA campgrounds—probably a lot of secrets buried there. The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of the suburbs written by the people who designed the menu at Olive Garden—it’s inoffensive, forgettable, and you don’t actually have to chew anything. The prodigal 24-year-old Nina Ostroff (Leighton Meester) returns home to West Orange, New Jersey, to visit her family for the holidays. There she embarks on an unsteamy affair with her dad’s best friend David Walling (Hugh Laurie), who lives right across the street with his wife and daughter. All of which rips away suburbia’s beige duvet basically to reveal another beige, higher-thread-count duvet beneath. It’s all really suburbs-affirming, ultimately. Which is fine! But then why make so much watered-down fun of life in the sprawl? The Oranges, aka John Updike’s Christmas Vacation, makes such a big honkin’ deal about Nina’s exodus from Jersey after high school and the failure of David’s daughter Vanessa (the awesome Alia Shawkat) to achieve escape velocity, and then—following the climactic destruction of a holiday lawn display as a boring, limp-dick protest against the status quo—decides that all the tract housing is O.K. after all.