This Must Be the Place

source: This Must Be the Place

I watched this last night. I liked the character of Cheyenne a great deal. Sean Penn's performance was for me the centre of this film, especially the dialogue that was sometimes very sharp and unexpected. It must be said however that the movie went on a lot of unnecessary tangents. Whole plot lines were opened up and then left unresolved. The biggest one seems to be the disappearance of the Irish boy Tony. There are several scenes involving Tony's mother, but they lead nowhere. Basically someone should have got into the script, cut all the flab out and focused on what is important here - the character of Cheyenne and his (mis)adventures. If you had to categorise this movie you would probably put it in the "self-discovery/road movie" basket. Cheyenne is having a bit of a crisis, goes travelling and then rediscovers himself. Unfortunately in Cheyenne's world there is very little meaning to be found. Things happen arbitrarily, people launch into meaningless random conversations in almost every scene. The camera focuses on bizarre unrelated objects. It seems like there isn't very much to learn from a world like this, so the message I got was "you may as well be yourself". I was expecting the movie to end with Cheyenne back in Dublin, hugging his wife and saying something like "I guess I like things just the way they are." It was therefore surprising to me that there was only one scene with Cheyenne back in Dublin and it didn't involve his friends of family at all. Instead he is looking at the cranky mother who lost her son, and he is dressed as blandly as possible. It's difficult to draw any meaning from this scene, although it's possibly implying that he is now embarking on a "normal" life. It was a contradictory and a very dissatisfying conclusion.

I'm a big fan of Sorrentino's work, and I was curious to see his attempt with a bigger production, surrounded by "big shots". I must say that I found the movie very disappointing. 1) It tries to hard to get the status of "cult" movie, by using artsy shots, a self-indulgent camera-work, and catchy lines. Quite a few times you are left wondering what the heck a scene is trying to convey (e.g., the lift to the American Indian, or the heavily tattooed guy at the bar, the truck's self-combustion). My feeling was that those additional characters and incidents add nothing, apart from trying to make you think that you are watching something "special". 2) The characters do not come across as "natural". They all seem a parody. I do like Frances McDormand. I think she is a terrific actress. But her role did not have any depth, and felt out of place in several occasions (why is she a firefighter?). 3) The whole Dublin-U.S.-Dublin trip is not believable. It's too surreal, the initial motivation behind it in particular. The ending scene is kind of touching, though.

Three weeks ago I see the trailer for THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and thought "This looks like a pretty good film I have to see it" I was not disappointed THIS MUST BE THE PLACE was all I thought it was going to be and much more it was a stunning captivating film as a aging rock star Cheyenne (Sean Penn) in a Oscar worthy performance seeks revenge for the sadistic Nazi concentration camp guard that may still be alive who was especially hard on his just deceased father. Cheyenne is a unique interesting character that at times you feel both pity and anger toward at one point in the film he is speaking with a woman and her son where the woman says "Cheyenne once sang with Mick Jagger where he corrects her saying "Actually Mick Jagger once sang with Me" I cannot recommend this film enough go see it the ending is standing ovation worthy.

An ageing, softly spoken Gothic rock star named Cheyenne (Sean Penn) is bored with his life in Dublin. He opts to wear full makeup everyday and lives in a huge mansion with his wife Jane (Frances McDormand), who is a fire-fighter. He is also friends with Mary (Eve Hewson), an unhappy Goth girl who has been separated from her mother. Cheyenne tries and fails to set her up with someone in the mall who is interested in her. He also regularly visits the grave of a boy because he feels responsible for his death, even though the parents tell him not to visit. One of the other major threads in Cheyenne's life is that he has not spoken to his father in thirty years, who was a holocaust survivor in Auschwitz. When he learns of his death, Cheyenne decides to travel across America and with the help of a man named Mordecai (Judd Hirsch) he works to find the Nazi war criminal Aloise (Heinz Lieven) who humiliated his father. This is a confused rare misfire for the ever reliable Sean Penn, due to a hopelessly muddled screenplay. It is the first English language feature of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, who also co-wrote the script with Umberto Contrarello. The film starts promisingly because Sorrentino's first major theme, isolation, is a successful one. He resorts to giving Cheyenne's house a cool, sterile look through a white colour palette scheme. This is deliberately at odds with Cheyenne's Gothic appearance. He's been compared quite accurately to the lead singer of The Cure, Robert Smith. He is always dressed in black, with dark eyeliner and red lipstick that characterises him deliberately as feminine and therefore misplaced against any lighter tones. People stare at him in malls and supermarkets, either to take pictures or just to laugh at his appearance. Further visualising his stasis and isolation is Sorrentino's camera, where the tracking shots are purposely slow in their movements to show how this bloke is drifting rather aimlessly through life. Unfortunately, the same can be said about the film itself. The script is so overloaded with strange details, side characters and threads that its almost an impenetrable movie. There's little clarity about who exactly these people are, how they relate to each other and why they're in this film other than to project an idea, rather than a personality. I found the relationship between Mary and Cheyenne, who he insists is not his daughter, to be quite bizarre since they regularly hang out together. Even more unlikely is the brief time he spends with a waitress who recognises him and then lets him stay with her and her son briefly. It's equally frustrating that many characters, including the wasted talents of Frances McDormand, fade out of the story for so long that there is no continuity in the plot, leaving the film without a focus. The misguidance of the narrative is apparent is just how long it takes to reach the film's main revenge thread. It's close to an hour into the film and ends on a whimper. Adding further confusion is the film's reliance on self-conscious dialogue that is infuriatingly cryptic. When he's told that his burger is overcooked, Cheyenne replies: "We go from an age when we say 'My life will be that', to an age when we say 'That's life'". I'm all for Wes Anderson-like quirkiness but lines like this really test your threshold for pseudo-intellectualism. At most one can praise the bravery of Penn's performance, one of the strangest of a distinguished career, even if his character's motives are unclear and implausible. 'Remote' is not a word you normally associate with Penn but he succeeds in making Cheyenne cold and distant and sometimes funny, through his small whispery voice, followed by an occasional outburst that is true to his passive-aggressive nature. In spite of the lead performance though, it's a very unsatisfying and unmoving film that shares all too much in common with its central character.

It took quite a while until this movie comes to the US, I do not know why it took so long, yet I hope it gets the response it deserves (I saw it in Europe months ago already). Sean Penn is just amazing and the whole movie is something you don't see much in US cinemas. Its so different that there is almost no comparison. Of course it will be a big hit within the Gothic scene, but also the regular movie fan should give it a try. Its very slow paced road trip, but Penn carries that overwhelmingly with his outstanding performance of the character, who reminds of course of Robert Smith, but in a superb way. The story is very simple and so I leave that totally out, since it would spoil it right away. My favorite scene is when he visits the show from David Bryne playing "This must be the place", keep it in mind and enjoy the show! Its certainly an experience for real movie fans! (That it won't be a huge box office hit, most likely, should not hold anybody back who wants to see a good movie!)

How refreshing it is to sit through an inspirational and yet entertaining story. If you fell in love with Sean Pen during the trailer, you will definitely be happy to know that those two hours will not disappoint you. "This Must be the Place" brings back Penn and his wonderful talent to depict a strange character that doesn't seem to connect with the world around him. It's a delicious journey through the ups and downs of life and the numerous ways of facing them. It's about love and family, courage and determination in searching for what makes sense to you in spite of what people may think. Penn is extraordinarily funny in a simple way, unpretentiously humble and somehow adorable as a man who sees the world differently from everybody else. I had a wonderful time watching this movie, without that feeling of betrayal left by so many deceitful trailers.

Something tells me that Paolo Sorrentino is sick and tired of traditional narrative. Perhaps it's too boring for him. Maybe not edgy enough. And so, he gives us this: a story so buried and convoluted by his resistance to anything remotely resembling coherence that by the end of the movie, you feel like any extra on the film could step into a shot and the film would be about him or her for the closing five minutes because... because... oh, why the hell not? Lots of emotional women, wise and knowing men--except the Indian who appears in the truck out of the blue and then exits just as abruptly. It's this kind of cutting edge cinema that will rescue cinema from itself! (Read that last sentence gesticulating and with bravado, preferably from a balcony overlooking the town square.) Poor Sean Penn. He publicly dressed down Terence Malick for turning his character into an enigma wrapped in a riddle, and yet, here he is making character choices to be exactly that. Maybe he needs Robin Wright to vet his screenplays. I hope before he signs on with another project, he dumps his current agent and signs on with someone who'll find him better material. The best part of this film, BTW, is the David Byrne performance. Unfortunately, because it's the highlight and really has nothing to do with the rest of the film, it only emphasizes how little else this movie has to offer. I've seen worse, but having just watched it, I've yet to shake its awfulness off me and would be hard-pressed to name one. So for now, it reigns supreme as the worst movie I've seen. For now.

It is rare that I will switch a film off after 10 minutes, this is a man who sat through Tree of Life, but this film forced me to reach for the remote. It is little wonder that the Irish economy is in such dire straits if it is wasting it's money on a film about Robert Smith having suffered a stroke. Ozzie Osbourne would have been better in the lead role - at least then it would have been funny. I gave it 2 because of the photography. A misguided attempt to put a Hollywood name outside the theatre. What were they thinking? What was Sean Penn thinking? About as much as the lead character one would think. You can't put lipstick on a pig.

Sorrentino suggests a complex history, probably too much to be treated as raw material in the manner of the comic Tarantino. It 'a problem of linguistic register that plagues the film, which does not form differs little from the content. Missing, as it did of the previous films, the inseparable link between the images and the underlying meaning of the story is the poetry. Sorrentino is a master in the representation of existential emptiness, inability to communicate, the discomfort of contemporary living in a global society and devitalized, which also he made but where is not found, indeed, to be exact, where he feels inadequate. The shots are always essential, therefore, made of geometric architecture and empty, and almost metaphysical hyper-realist, then here is the succession of supermarkets, shopping malls, escalators, a futuristic flying bridge over the heads of men and houses. This explains the predilection sites for aseptic and soulless as the 'Switzerland colorless in "The consequence of love", the repulsive fascist architecture of Latin America in "The Family Friend", the insignificant reality in the province of Ascoli novel "They are all right," the chilling anonymous motels inland U.S. and so on. Even the protagonist of "This Must Be The Place" moves in similar places, so much so that Ireland and the United States does not have a recognizable identity: the sites of action does not belong to any particular place, and the mall , as well as the country overwhelmed by highway interchanges and overpasses, could be either in any suburb in the world. The rock stars of the film is called Cheyenne, but in reality is Robert Smith, the leader of the Cure although Sorrentino uses the character as a figure of the collective imagination and adapts it to his purposes in making the protagonist of an adventure as any hero comics. Certainly, the director may have been attracted by the figure of Smith for the close relationship with some of these films as David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" and "Muholland Drive" which prefigured the dark scene. Cheyenne leads an empty life, on the brink of despair, made darker by guilt, symbolized by the trolley that accompanies any of its activities, was to do the grocery shopping, or more properly to travel. When you meet the inventor of the trolley, you will also find the right clue leads him to seek out the hiding place of his father's Nazi torturer and the film draws to its conclusion. During the confession of the German shows that even this man pulls his weight, his sense of guilt to be expiated. The story then acquires a universal, with biblical references also about the human condition: each pulls its weight, everyone is on the brink of the precipice and we must persevere in the search for salvation, and atone for his guilt. Only then will the catharsis can take place and start the regeneration. It 'obvious that requires a lot of meat to cook sublime skill to be properly represented without running the risk of slipping and falling into banality. Sorrentino does his best, but in the end is a certain feeling of coldness and cleavage. However, only three minutes on the scene in which David Byrne makes imperative the movie.