Cyrus is a film that would benefit greatly from an audience that has never seen its trailer.
With its low-tech aesthetic, it's very nearly a film pretending to be something it's not - not an offender like Dan in Real Life, but in the vein of Pieces of April or Sherrybaby. Hand-held cameras and tight zooms make for a borderline uncomfortable intimacy with faces old, young, unpleasant, and pretty. Although this establishes a methodical scratch across the lens of LA life, telling us that, yes, this is what real life is like for "normal" people, you're never sure exactly what any of the characters do outside of their small, 3-person social lives and undefined jobs.
Unfolding slowly and revealing nothing that we don't already know from the preview material, we gradually learn that John (John C. Reilly) is crazy for Marisa Tomei's bubbly Molly; a pretty and fun 40-something who, it turns out, has a 21 year-old son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill). As we all already know, Cyrus is more than a little bit creepy, and wants to screw John over without his mother suspecting a thing. Hill's performance shines in the trailer, but does nothing to flourish on screen in the following 90 minutes. His creepiness factor is actually diminished with the refreshing lack of a ; a look of which the actor is so fond.
Rather than poking fun at the less-than-natural relationship between Molly and Cyrus, the subject is tip-toed around, leaving a void where the audience is unsure whether to laugh or bear judgment. While the pacing is excellent, there are no surprises, making for a long, drawn-out journey towards a climax that falls on its face along with John and Cyrus. All that's left to decide is how Molly will handle the situation.
Only vaguely endearing, Cyrus is easy on the laughs and leaves little to the imagination.
Cyrus is released in UK cinemas this Friday, 10 September.
7 comments:
Oh Nicola, you're so wrong. You can't judge a film by comparing it to its trailer, or even complaining that you saw too much in the trailer. I mean, what are you reviewing here - the marketing campaign or the movie?
To say that "Hill's performance shines in the trailer, but does nothing to flourish on screen in the following 90 minutes" suggests that the trailer is like a pre-credits sequence that the film-makers created and is actually a part of the film itself. But we all know that's not the case, and the people who cut the trailers are often distinctly removed from the people who made the movie.
I don't doubt that you've got valid reasons for disliking Cyrus, but I'm not really hearing them in this review.
I don't mean to simply compare it to the trailer, but you're right, I did focus on that. What I'm saying is that if you've seen the trailer, you know what will happen. This is (of course) the point of a trailer, but during Cyrus you spend the entire film waiting for it to get to the point. The whole "you mess with me, I mess with you" thing passed very quickly, which I had anticipated would make for most of the entertaining moments in the film. In the end all they really did was twist each other's words and have a brief knock-about.
I guess in some ways I expected it to be more like your typical Hollywood rom-com set-up, where the trailer shows you the characters and the dilemma, then funny things happen in the second act, and it's how they get out of the situation that is kind of the final viewer satisfaction.
Maybe I am criticising the trailer more than the film itself, but it's because of the campaign that I was left cold; I didn't feel like there was more to learn about the characters than I had already seen. Their worlds were so tiny that it was inevitable that they'd have to stick together. There was nowhere else for the story to lead. Where would they go, what would they do? They only have each other (and a mutual acquaintance in Keener's character).
While I agree that the film holds no surprises in its story, I think the thoughtful characterization and enjoyable conversations made it a fun watch. I didn't love it but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
I think you're spot on with the lack of surprises. Everything just kinda works out. I admire the writers aversion to BS Hollywood plot devices, but truthful doesn't necessarily equal under-dramatized.
Still, not a terrible film, just underwhelming.
Alex & Michael - I do agree that it wasn't a *bad* film, I just found it, as you said Michael, decidedly underwhelming. I was excited for it and it disappointed.
It seems, Nicola, that the reason you didn't like it was the exact same reason I thought it was so good. You said you expected it to be more like a typical rom-com, but that's exactly what it wasn't, and that's why it worked.
As far as I'm concerned, the last thing I want to see is yet another formulaic, unrealistic rom-com where an obviously scripted and engineered scenario is milked to the limit at the expense of any kind of believability. That's lazy, patronising filmmaking, and there's enough of that already.
In Cyrus the Duplass brothers take a set-up that could so easily become the aforementioned guff, but play it in a way that says 'what if we limit these characters to the kind of behaviour that actually happens in the real world?' That, to me, leads to a much more satisfying film than any standard cynical 'dilemma - comedy - neat pay-off' formula.
And I totally disagree that the characters are on a predictable arc. *SPOILER* The reason why the end of the film is good is because you're still not sure if Cyrus isn't still plotting some way to wreck John's life again. And similarly, you have an unsettling suspicion that John may actually be a bit of an obsessive/compulsive himself. It's all there, it's just much more subtle than the average studio pic.
So there.
Re the rom-com forumula, not at all. What I am getting at is that I wanted the "you mess with me, I mess with you" to be tense and funny and be more than a couple of conversations. Is that an expectation to be patronised? I don't know. I didn't want Cyrus to be just like all these other rom-coms, of course not. What I meant was that the point of tension you're told about usually takes more screen-time and is where you get the most laughs. Maybe I'm the only one who didn't find it funny.
I agree that the character arcs aren't predictable, but I think that the story was. I see the subtleties, and I appreciate them too, but all of that was overshadowed by the fact that I didn't laugh, and the low-budget aesthetic vs high profile actors really throws me off as a viewer.
Post a Comment