Cyrus, by Mark and Jay Duplass
(The Puffy Chair, Baghead), is an attempt to
give a bit of an artistic edge to one of Hollywood’s most
successful commercial genres of recent years, the slacker comedy.
It doesn’t work. Though intermittently funny and provocative in
its set-up, the brothers Duplass don’t bother following through
with the latter. Designed as a meditation on the fantasies of
lonely men who are or seem to themselves to be for some reason
shut out of normal sexual relations with women, the movie draws
back from this fantasizing into a fantasy of its own in which
social and sexual dysfunction prove to be no big deal after all
and are given a facile commercial resolution. The trouble is that
the rather troubling outlines of the picture’s
mise-en-scène are still visible through the bland
conventionality into which it eventually sinks.
This retreat from its own edginess is summed up in the
opening scene in which Jamie (Catherine Keener) is found knocking
on the door of her ex-husband, John (John C. Reilly). Getting no
answer, she enters through the unlocked door and finds John lying
prone on his bed with his pants around his ankles and a pair of
headphones clamped to his ears. His denials that he is doing what
she assumes he is doing seem to match his state of denial about
his relationship to her. She has come to tell him that she and
her new boyfriend, Tim (Matt Walsh), have decided to get married,
and John does not take it well. Jamie points out that they have
been divorced for seven years. “It still stinks,” says John. And:
“I’m still surprised.” Yet, though he professes to be surprised
and shocked, at the same time he says, “I knew it!” — as people
will when accusing others of what seems to them treachery.
What’s with this guy? Why does the long-divorced Jamie
still have such power over John, even though she was the one who
ended the relationship? Why does he still turn to her for help
and advice at every turn and why does she — and, still more, Tim
— put up with it? John seems to have carried passive-aggression
to a whole new level. He allows himself to be ordered around by
Jamie and even by Jamie’s new man, but this is all part of the
fantasy she represents in the movie, that of the ex-wife as best
friend and confidant whose continuing concern for John is quite
unfazed by his attempts to cling to her. And she finally leads
him into a relationship with another fantasy in the form of the
fantastically sexy Molly (Marisa Tomei), whom he meets at a party
that Jamie has insisted he attend just in order to meet somebody
new.
Even Molly cannot tear him away from his creepy intimacy
with Jamie, but this is at least partly because she has an even
creepier intimacy of her own with her grown-up son, Cyrus (Jonah
Hill), who lives alone with her and whose relationship with her
is anything but healthy. Such dramatic energy as the movie
contains comes from the tug-of-war between these two creepy guys
with their creepy dependency on inappropriate relationships with
women who are themselves rather creepily unwilling to set
boundaries for them. That this struggle between two natural
enemies puts John on the side of a more normal and healthy
relationship makes him the hero, but only by contrast with Cyrus,
but both are borderline stalkers. And that their respective
stalkees both seem rather flattered by the attention, is the
movie’s real fantasy.
Indeed, John’s meet-cute with Molly at the party results
from her unaccountably finding attractive both his urinating in
his hosts’ yard and his embarrassing singalong to “Don’t You Want
Me, Baby?” by the Human League. In case you don’t know this song,
the chorus goes like this:
Don’t, don’t you want me
You know I can’t believe it
When I hear that you won’t see me
Don’t, don’t you want me
You know I don’t believe you
When you say that you don’t need me
It’s much too late to find
You think you’ve changed your mind
You’d better change it back
Or we will both be sorry
That John thinks this the best song ever is just one more
indication that he is a stalker by temperament, if a genial and
harmless one — at least compared to Cyrus whose relationship
with his mother just skirts the borders of incestuousness. So the
regular or garden-variety stalker is a fantasist, like the
movie-makers, but the latter’s’ fantasy includes the fantasy of
someone who makes their hero-stalker look like a preferable
alternative to the other stalker in the stalkee’s life. As this
is a fantasy, albeit one constrained by the necessities of
commercial success, you can probably guess what happens. Creepy
as he is, Cyrus is not allowed to become any real danger to
himself or others — or even, ultimately, to the relationship
between John and Molly. So, we ask ourselves at the end, what was
that all about? And, like the slackers that they are and
that they celebrate, the Duplass brothers shrug their shoulders
and say, “Whatever.”
