CYRUS 2 ½ stars
Fox Searchlight, Rated R
A bad-timing love triangle and intermittent emotional showdown, Cyrus swings between tragic moments and awkward laughs with an indecisive female object of desire who can’t seem to make up her mind between two rivals competing for her affection. In any case, she’s already deeply involved with one of them, who just happens to be her possessive son.
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Written and directed by siblings Jay and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Baghead), Cyrus stars John C. Reilly as divorced loner John, a guy in a deep funk still stressed about the wife (Catherine Keener) who left him nearly a decade ago. But his spirits are lifted when Molly (Marisa Tomei), a rare woman not repelled by his moodiness, walks into his life, though her habit of bolting from his bedroom at dawn is a little suspect.
John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill in Cyrus
So, John follows her home one morning and is surprised to encounter her unusually polite adult son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill). It seems Mommy fears upsetting the grown child by sharing herself with any man, so she’s never actually had a boyfriend, and though Cyrus as a sort of Oedipus ‘Wrecks’ extends gracious hospitality towards the baffled beau, when John starts sleeping over, it’s an entirely different matter. Cyrus is soon beckoning Mom into his own bed when not making John’s shoes disappear.
Too talky for its own good, the movie plays out more like a series of psychodrama therapy sessions than a story with solid dramatic momentum. And though Hill and Reilly are a feisty match-up when locking territorial horns around major separation anxiety issues, it’s a stretch to place two terrific comic actors in such solemn situations.
Combining an overload of Oedipal and empty nest syndrome elements without a clear focus as to where it’s all headed, Cyrus also perpetuates that stereotypical blame game notion in movies, that males raised by single moms without a man around are defective and inevitable damaged goods. John and Jonah: You come off a whole lot better when you make us laugh.
