Cyrus (2010)

I hope you’ve never heard of the “Mumblecore” film movement and genre of the independent film world or this diatribe will be entirely pointless. Mumblecore is one of the many forms of independent filmmaking, with many directors being acolytes. The first film considered a Mumblecore film was Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha. What defines a Mumblecore film is a low budget, use of non-professional actors, although Jay and Mark Duplass (the directors of this review’s subject) use professional actors, and a lot of improvisational acting. The plot and story usually revolve around a post-college relationship between two White (Not always; Medicine for Melancholy used Black protagonists) heterosexuals. Now, that all that copy and paste from Wikipedia is out of the way, let us review Mumblecore comedy-drama, Cyrus.

John (John C. Riley) is a depressed, divorcee of seven years who, after being dragged to a party by his ex-wife Jamie (Catherine Keener) for him to meet someone, meets and has sex with Molly (Marisa Tomei). After a second date and second night of sex, John catches Molly sneaking out at night. Since she won’t tell him, he follows her to her home. The next morning, he sneaks around the house to found out what is going on and encounters Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly’s 21 year-old son, who is friendly but has an aura of weirdness around and is very, emphasis on very, close to his mother. While John is able to get on with Molly and Cyrus, he gets a paranoid feeling that maybe Cyrus doesn’t like him; a supposition solidified by find his missing shoes in Cyrus’ closet. John learns that he now has to compete with Cyrus for Molly’s affection and attention.

The camera work in Cyrus is very strange, although it might not be, since Mumblecore’s trademark is naturalism but, from what I’ve researched, that is in scripts and casting not in camera work. It looks professional and every shot that needs to be in vivid colours is, but you’ll soon notice that the camera nudges slightly every few seconds. Not extreme shaky-cam like Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project, but like a heavy camera is being carried by someone rather than on a stand and there are few edited camera cuts, so when two people are having a conversation, the camera just swishes from side-to-side, sometimes going out of focus, almost like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, but this isn’t supposed to be a documentary or a mockumentary.

This review is very short, but that is because Cyrus is a very insubstantial film. It doesn’t do anything wrong or memorably horrible, but it does nothing great or spectacular either; the acting is good and the script is okay, and the cinematography is okay (If strangely documentary-like); but the plot is really nothing new, the tale of “Man-meets-woman-woman-has-son-son-hates-man” is as old as Feudalism. And while the film has a few chuckles here and there and part of the plot synopsis does describe a funny scenario but they don‘t do anything with it, it’s more a ‘Romantic Dramatic’ than a ‘Dramedy’. The film doesn’t give anything, except a pretty okay if treaded-many-times story, but it really doesn’t take any thing from you. You would be glad you saw it, but feel no necessity for repeat viewings

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