Movie Review: Cyrus
by KYW's Bill Wine
Bit of a sad sack, this John guy. Bit of a wishbone, this Molly. Bit of a mama's boy, this Cyrus.
Bit of a weird romantic triangle, this Cyrus.
Cyrus is an edgy comedy about a guy who falls for a woman who has and lives with a grown son with whom she is thisclose.
John C. Reilly plays John, a freelance fortysomething film editor in contemporary Los Angeles who's been divorced for seven years.
His ex-wife, played by Catherine Keener, with whom he remains surprisingly friendly and who is about to remarry, has almost maternally protective feelings for him: she would sincerely like nothing better than for him to find a satisfying romantic relationship.
That looks like a possibility when John meets Molly, the warmly vivacious massage therapist played by Marisa Tomei. She's not blind to John's limitations, but she's the kind of person who looks beyond the surface.
John and Molly click, but she tells him that her life is complicated, and he soon learns that she does indeed already have a man in her life. But it's her 21-year-old son Cyrus, a passive-aggressive New Age musician played by Jonah Hill.
Cyrus is nothing if not a devoted son. He still lives in his single mom's house (where he was not only brought up but home-schooled), majors in clinging, and may not be quite ready to share his mom with anyone else.
The level of intimacy that John notices in the way Molly and Cyrus's two-person household works (bedroom doors never being closed, to use one example; the bathroom being used simultaneously, for another) brings the creepiness factor right to the surface.
John and Cyrus have several things in common, including their misfit status and their love for Molly. Will they clash? Oh, yeah -- the rivalry is off and running. Sprinting is more like it.
Cyrus was written and directed by Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Baghead), do-it-yourself independents who here get the chance to work with major talents in front of the camera.
The relationship-based comedy is of the painful and awkward, tragedy's-right-around-the-corner, should-I-really-be-laughing-here variety. The emotional rawness isn't always comfortable to witness, but it is very definitely stimulating and thought-provoking, even though the narrative doesn't let its premise play out to quite the extent we wish it would.
Not that we want to throw the manchild out with the bathwater.
Executive producers Ridley Scott and Tony Scott allow the idiosyncratic directors Duplass, making their mainstream debut, to use the loose, low-budget, minimalist, improvisational style -- often referred to as "mumblecore" -- that they have always featured (not so the Scotts).
And this top-drawer cast makes it work splendidly in this actors' showcase, one that resists the temptation to go bigger than it needs to.
Reilly, Tomei, Keener, and Hill are not only adroit improvisational actors with confident comic timing, they know how to play the ambiguity. And in this low-key story, there's never any shortage of ambiguity -- although sometimes it seems an awful lot like under-writing, most acutely when the final reel seems to pull up short.
All four principals are fine, but we expect it of Reilly, Tomei, and Keener because we've seen it before. It's Hill, however, who surprises and impresses us by expanding his range in pleasantly surprising ways, showing us, among other things, a deadpan menace we haven't seen before.
So we'll cling to 2½ stars out of 4 for this decidedly offbeat and fascinatingly understated comedy of discomfort. As the old joke says: "Oedipus, shmoedipus -- as long as he loves his mother."
