Is Cyrus on to something? The film inadvertently answers 'yes.' Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures
Cyrus
♥♥♥♥♥
Starring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, Catherine Keener
Directed and written by Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass
“Many a man before you, in his dreams, has shared his mother’s bed.”
– Jocasta to her husband and, as she finds out later, son, Oedipus
“Seriously, don’t fuck my mom.”
– Cyrus, to his mom’s new boyfriend, John
A pallid, one-tone living room becomes a backdrop to a cutting tension, with the presence of a man with delicate, boyish features, and no pants, wielding a knife. He’s fascinated by you. Fortunately, he’s just an awkward, hefty kid you can easily outrun, with a small nose and pretty, blue eyes. He slices the air, gesturing at you to come with him.
This is how it is for the poor, charmless divorcé, John (John C. Reilly) to sleep over at his new girlfriend Molly’s house. Molly (Marisa Tomei) and her 21-year-old son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill), live in organic harmony, not unlike Cyrus’s hypnotic New Age music. It begins like something’s off in its eerie cordiality, then it becomes a confusing dance. You wonder, is the harmony really upbeat, or is it threatening? Is Cyrus really the genial mama’s boy, or is he trying to be mama’s man? Cue swelling New Age music.
As it turns out, Cyrus uses the knife to cut a sandwich, which he offers to John, but he also goes inside Molly’s bathroom, with Molly in it, showering behind translucent curtains. Cyrus then closes the door on an understandably perplexed and concerned John, who is now not a big fan of Freud.
All male homo sapiens are biologically hardwired to hold on to someone like Molly though, offspring of hers or not. Molly’s body is a sculpture of clean lines and well-architected curves, her hair the kind that springs back and the kind you’d want to rest your head on, and her face, though showing early signs of too much sun, looks like sunlight itself. Though Cyrus and Molly’s family dynamic borders on incest, and the film capitalizes on sexual innuendos, it becomes clear that what this family has is an organic, if unhealthy, attachment to each other.
The film spends much of its time being mysterious and suggestive about Molly and Cyrus’s real relationship, that, perhaps, its directors forgot to resolve its bigger mystery: why Molly is attracted to John in the first place.
The film portrays John as hardly likeable. The only real charisma he has is his wounded-puppy look and his wounded-puppy story. But, this charisma is highly soluble in alcohol, you see.
An intoxicated John meets Molly at a party while he pees in the bushes. This could be a charming meet if he had something witty to say to her, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaves her to drunk-dance and to slur the words to the ’80s song “Don’t You Want Me.”
John is long-divorced to the beautiful Jamie (Catherine Keener), so it’s apparent that he’s capable of attracting women who are, according to Cyrus, “out of his league.” Perhaps there should have been a there’s-something-about-John aspect to this movie, in addition to the suspicious mother-and-son-relationship angle.
John C. Reilly, instead of portraying a believably lovable guy who can charm unbelievably gorgeous and kind women, unintentionally portrays a creep quite well: stalking a woman home and offering her no explanation, urinating in public with no funny excuse at hand and has really bad and awkward conversations with women he’s trying to impress.
To his credit, he’s a kind man, but, for a free spirit like Molly, it seems like John needs to be more than kind. The only time directors Jay and Mark Duplass play chemist with their leading actors is when we are shown a collage of John and Molly gazing into each others’ eyes, talking, dining, and generally being intimate while a voice-over plays of the couple’s conversations about their feelings. This part creates an atmosphere that you want to trust and believe.
Still, a few minutes of beautiful scenes do not make up for the inexplicable union of this highly unlikely couple. The directors either need to flesh out the character of John and Molly, or at least let the audience play Sherlock Holmes and give them clues as to these characters’ motivations.
Clearly, John’s rendition of “Don’t You Want Me” should not be treated like a rhetorical question, and, if the stunning, unattainable Molly (who hasn’t had a man over her house since Cyrus was born) were a flesh-and-blood character, then she would have had the Duplass brothers directing a very different movie after she sees a stranger at a party relieving himself on a lowly plant, and jumping in on the vocals of an awful ’80s hit.
