THE NEW FILM by Jay and Mark Duplass (Baghead) brings them upscale (with sponsorship from Tony and Ridley Scott, yet) without too much compromise in presenting a general atmosphere of failure and recrimination. They reinforce this atmosphere with locations in L.A.’s most criminally underrepresented neighborhoods on film: melancholy Highland Park, with its jungley ivy, old bungalows, balsa-wood apartments and velvety smog.
Cyrus’ protagonist is the potato-faced galoot John (John C. Reilly), a free-lance editor who is still attached to his ex-wife, Jamie (Catherine Keener); now that Jamie is at last remarrying, she urges John to get out and mingle. John makes a serious ass out of himself at a party, thanks to Red Bull and vodka, but he’s emotionally rescued. A “sex angel” named Molly (Marisa Tomei) takes him home.
What’s the hitch? That’s easily seen. Molly’s 22-year-old live-at-home son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill), is a hulking adult big baby with a jaw like a bullfrog; he’s never really been weaned. He reacts to John’s arrival first with passive aggressiveness and then with out and out sabotage. No one can say this situation is forced. Comedies with likely plots aren’t all that common, and the plausibility of this kind of three-way tangle keep things moving forward. The film has symmetry: John and Cyrus are fellow sufferers, stuck in the most rewarding relationship of their lives with women who can’t set up boundaries. Keener’s Jamie gives John motherly be-yourself advice for dealing with girls; she repeats what she must have repeated to him hundreds of times over the years and yet you can see she still enjoys giving this advice as much as John enjoys receiving it. Thus Molly, who mollycoddled her son, is the perfect woman for John in more ways than one. The merriness and brightness of Tomei, her sooty eyelashes and endearing girlishness, are what urges Cyrus further toward comedy, just as the serious-as-cancer bouts with Hill’s increasingly horrific Cyrus himself seem to push the film toward drama. You expect the story to build, and that’s when it unravels. The most mumblecore thing about Cyrus is the way it wraps up (or rather unwinds) into a series of healing conversations, even though everything the movie told us previously is that people don’t get over their issues by talking them through.
Cyrus
R; 92 min.
Plays at selected theaters
