"Cyrus," a dramatic romance splotched with awkward comedy, is surely the best movie by filmmaking brothers (and former Austinites) Jay and Mark Duplass. Their previous features, the satisfying dramedy "The Puffy Chair" and the shambling misfire "Baghead," were scruffy little movies that, with their jittery camera work and improvy vibe, earned the now-familiar label mumblecore.
"Cyrus" is slightly different, more accomplished, featuring known actors and comparatively tighter scripting. This isn't mumblecore, thankfully, yet the Duplasses' low-tech strategies are prominent and welcome, even if the filmmakers are working with John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill and Catherine Keener, a significant step up from nonprofessional casts, showing the brothers have arrived with Hollywood élan.
Reilly, moviedom's go-to schlub, plays John, a slovenly idler who still mopes about his divorce seven years ago from Keener's noncharacter Jamie. A loser in love, and about everything else, John meets Tomei's comely Molly at a party and, miraculously, they plunge into a torrid relationship. John, with a potato head topped by kinky macaroni, can't believe his luck. He wonders why Molly would hook up with a guy resembling, in his word, Shrek. He possesses a sweet demeanor and disarming honesty, that's why.
Molly's also been loveless for years, making you wonder if men are intimidated by this winsome woman or she's just been pushing them away, because - and this is a big because - she lives with her demonstrably dysfunctional 21-year-old son Cyrus. He's played with low-boil passive-aggression by Hill, who's spry at coaxing deadpan comedy from discomfort. Cyrus looks like a globular, overinflated blow-up toy and emits weirdo warning signs of a man-child stuck in a state of sociopathic immaturity.
Yet Molly indulges his foibles - she coddles him - and she loves Cyrus like an overgrown baby. If Hill and Tomei's chemistry never fully clicks, you get used to their mismatched casting and it works well enough. Their cozy relationship discombobulates John, and Reilly drolly expresses this with confused body language and blank, baffled looks.
Cyrus regards John as a toxic threat to his and Molly's ironclad bond as best friends. He actively tries to sabotage the affair with devious psychological warfare that is sometimes very funny, sometimes outright creepy.
"Cyrus," which played the South by Southwest Film Festival in March, is lightweight but occasionally flies off the handle.
It aspires to a deep and truthful realism, something the wispy premise gropes for but can't grab. It lacks storytelling sophistication, meat and sinew.
Still, there's something pleasingly unaffected about it. The Duplasses bring a quasi-Altmanesque formlessness to the movie - overlapping dialogue, quick zooms and a restless, roving camera (operated by Jay Duplass). The score is nearly nonexistent. Sometimes minimalism is a virtue.
'Cyrus'
Our grade: B
Genres: Comedy, Comedy Drama
Running Time: 92 min
MPAA rating: R (Adult Language, Adult Situations)
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