Friday, April 23, 2010

Movie Review: Cyrus

Cyrus is a very odd comedy. John C. Reilly plays a depressed divorced man named John. His ex (Catherine Keener) is remarrying and drags him to a party. There's a lot of modern comedy about uncomfortable scenes and Cyrus delivers here. Where it gets odd is that Molly (Marisa Tomei) is attracted to him. What improbably wouldn't even be a one night stand turns into a relationship. You have to figure she has something emotionally wrong with her and it turns out it's Cyrus, her 21 year-old son who lives with her and is played by Jonah Hill. Their relationship is a bit too close. John and Molly's relationship then become how well Cyrus accepts John. You can see the comic potential.

A good amount of that potential was achieved, I did laugh a lot, but the film sticks to an offbeat tone and a unique voice. That usually goes a long way for me this time it kept me off balance. Molly and Cyrus kept talking about honesty and openness but it turns out one of them wasn't and the other was utterly blind. What I thought was leading up to a giant blow out, just petered out in the end. That may be unconventional, but it also undercut my understanding of the characters.

The film also had some awkward handheld camera work with arbitrary zooming that didn't work for me. There were also some odd editing choices with the dialog not matching the shots of the characters. That can all be ok, but it seemed to do this for no useful effect and just called attention to itself and pulled me out of the story. That's exactly what editing is supposed to not do.

Up until the ending I would have given this film a four out of five, but I just sat dumbstruck at the ending (literally) and that dropped it down to a three.

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