Paolo Sorrentino (2011)

I was going to describe it as genuinely odd but perhaps genuinely isn’t the word.  Still, Paolo Sorrentino’s new film, based on a screenplay which he wrote with Umberto Contarello, is distinctive enough to be entertaining and often bracing – thanks to Sorrentino’s perspective on American geography, David Byrne’s disarming music, bits of comedy that take you by surprise, and Sean Penn as the protagonist, a retired rock star called Cheyenne.   The early stages describe his reclusive life in Ireland; an expat American, he then returns home when he learns that his father, from whom he’s been estranged for years, is at death’s door.  Cheyenne arrives too late but, after the funeral and a meeting with a Nazi hunter called Mordecai Midler (Judd Hirsch), he sets off on a journey to track down Aloise Lange, the SS guard who humiliated his father in Auschwitz.    Sorrentino exults in the foreignness of America – the endless roads, the wide-open spaces, the small motel rooms – and the director’s enthusiasm is infectious.  Photographed by Luca Bigazzi, This Must Be the Place is visually lively – in the whirling movement of the camera, the colouring of the images (sometimes luminously vivid and always rich, even in the darkish interior of a motel), and the compositions, especially of physically unusual individuals alone in a streetscape or landscape.   Cheyenne, who performed with a band called the Fellows, epitomises the visual extraordinariness of the people in the film.  Although he isn’t pining for his vanished stardom, he retains the sable wardrobe, hairdo and face paint of a gothic rocker.  (His name recalls Siouxsie, his appearance Robert Smith of The Cure.)

Cheyenne’s been married to Jane (Frances McDormand) for over thirty years, and her drollness doesn’t disguise her absolute devotion to him.  She’s all-knowing too:  when he tells her he’s suffering from depression, she diagnoses boredom and she’s right.  Sorrentino cleverly uses the tempo and structure of the scenes in Ireland to impart Cheyenne’s state of mind:  these are individually short and inconsequential, cumulatively frustrating and blah.  The disorienting rhythm of the story once it crosses the Atlantic – Cheyenne is no longer sure where things are taking him – achieves something similar.  Yet Cheyenne’s American odyssey is, below the surface, a familiar one:  it makes a man of him and rights longstanding wrongs. Apart from Jane and their dog, the only person in Ireland whose company he enjoys is a teenage goth called Mary (Eve Hewson), whose mother (Olwen Fouéré) sits at her window all day, hoping for the return of her disappeared son Tony.   The mother and Cheyenne seem to go back a long way; she appears to blame Cheyenne for Tony’s disappearance.  Cheyenne is a non-smoker and Mary’s mother explains this is because he’s never grown up – ‘Only children don’t want to smoke’.  When, near the end of the film, Cheyenne is preparing to return to Ireland, mission accomplished, he accepts a cigarette that’s offered to him, and we understand the point of Mary’s mother’s unlikely theory.   He has grown up because he’s made peace with his dead father and avenged what was done to him in Auschwitz.

Sean Penn is such a good actor that, even where his work on screen is disfigured by moral pomposity, he naturally creates an underlying character that keeps coming through.  (There are moments when this happens even in Mystic River – as when Jimmy Markum says goodbye to his daughter for what will turn out to be the last time or, in the film’s best sequence, when he and Dave Boyle are sitting talking together on the porch of Jimmy’s house.)  When critics talk about an actor drawing on himself to create a character, I’m never sure how they know that’s what’s happening and I’ve no idea how much Penn is doing that in his superb performances in Casualties of War, Dead Man Walking and Sweet and Lowdown.  I’m not sure either of the basis for media reports that Penn is homophobic but, even if you don’t buy these, it seems fair to suggest that the character of Harvey Milk was an imaginative stretch for him.  That stretch resulted in perhaps his greatest acting to date, and certainly one of the best screen performances of the last decade or more[1].

What Penn does in This Must Be the Place isn’t in that class but here too the distance between his own personality and that of the man he’s playing may be part of the explanation of why he’s so remarkable.   The performance is mannered all right but, while not every mannerism works, it’s amazing what Penn does with most of them.  However often Cheyenne blows a stray wisp of hair out of his face, it never quite seems right but the high, mirthless giggle is something else.  Just when you think it’s just too false to be true, Penn will use the laugh with unexpected witty precision (when he does this at the climax of a ping-pong match in a bar, there was merited applause in the audience for this London Film Festival screening).  And the speaking voice he’s devised is an astonishing comic instrument.  Cheyenne’s words often emerge painfully slowly, as if the effort were too much.  You occasionally wonder if he’s too tired of life to get to the end of the sentence yet he does, usually with a weary but withering putdown.  At other times, you think Penn’s building up to some sort of a zinger; the kicker is that he then just stops.   His middle-aged skinniness in the tight black outfits is funny too.  Penn virtually reverses the effect he achieved as Harvey Milk, when what looked like an ordinary man’s physique was shot through with effeminacy.  Cheyenne’s effete gestures and delivery are an expression of his jadedness but not of his sexual personality.

It’s the comedy of Penn’s portrait that’s to be cherished here, even though the dramatic layering of the character is impressive too.  Back in the 1980s, the morbidity of Cheyenne and the Fellows’ music caused two teenage Irish boys to commit suicide, and he regularly visits their grave.  Penn is powerful in an outburst which expresses Cheyenne’s remorse about these deaths and regret about his own childlessness (he laments this more than once).  It’s too designed to be a big moment but it is one, nevertheless – even though it’s also an indication of the script’s fundamental conventionality.  Penn doesn’t, however, connect very strongly with the other actors, and I don’t think Cheyenne’s egocentric isolation is a sufficient explanation of this – the lack of connection occurs almost regardless of Cheyenne’s feelings about the person he’s with.  The recipient of the my-blasted-life monologue is David Byrne, as himself.  We also see Byrne do a number with his band and the film takes its title from a Talking Heads song, which is performed by Penn (on guitar) and Grant Goodman (vocals), as the young son of Aloise Lange’s granddaughter Rachel.  Paolo Sorrentino’s admiration of David Byrne gets to be a bit much.

Some of the people Cheyenne meets on his mission to find Lange are very engaging, especially Kerry Condon, who’s charming as Rachel, and Harry Dean Stanton, in a great cameo as one of Lange’s Utah neighbours and the soi-disant inventor of the wheeled suitcase.  (His real-life equivalent is, in my view, someone else who deserves to be hunted down.)  These encounters have a double impact:  they’re engaging both in themselves and because the people that Cheyenne is meeting don’t realise his ulterior motive.  Joyce van Patten also registers strongly as Lange’s wife (who claims she’s a widow); she has more of an inkling that there’s more to Cheyenne than meets the eye.  Judd Hirsch, who I’d not seen in years, gives an unsubtle but forceful performance as Mordecai Midler.  As Jane, Frances McDormand is stronger in the scenes she doesn’t share with Penn – either on the other end of a phone when Cheyenne’s in America or inviting a young Irishman, who fancies his chances in the music business and introduces himself as ‘the future’, to go into the house and see her husband (‘The past awaits you’).

Sometimes Sorrentino’s off-the-wall detailing is unaccountably believable, sometimes it’s not.  Jane works as a firefighter; and the determined kookiness of this improbable idea is irritating.  On the other hand, she and Cheyenne regularly play hand pelota in the depths of an emptied swimming pool at their home; the swimming pool metaphor get overworked eventually (when Cheyenne meets up with Rachel and her son, who’s hydrophobic).  The pelota games, which Jane always wins unless she’s being kind to Cheyenne, ring truer.  The film’s final scenes are much more substantially bizarre.  Earlier on, Midler is showing a group of schoolkids – and Cheyenne – a slide show of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, photographs of dead bodies and living skeletons.  As you watch, you feel uncomfortable not just because of the undiminishing power of those images but because they jar with the prevailing stylish eccentricity of This Must Be the Place.  The images do and don’t prepare you for the climax.

Aloise Lange lives alone and in hiding in a sort of portacabin in the middle of the Utah desert:  his modus vivendi both rhymes with and puts into perspective Cheyenne’s own life in his Irish mansion.  There’s a long close-up of Lange, giving his account of his relationship with Cheyenne’s father in Auschwitz, and the camera eventually pulls back to reveal Cheyenne listening, holding the gun he bought and which we’ve wondered if he’ll have the nerve to use once he tracks Lange down.  Cheyenne decides to shoot Lange in a different way; he moves close to the old man and takes his picture.  Sorrentino then cuts to Mordecai Midler outside, waiting for Cheyenne to return to the jeep they’ve travelled there in.  Midler exclaims ‘Holy shit!’ at what he sees emerging from the portacabin and so, in effect, does the audience:  it’s Aloise Lange, hands clutched over his genitals, as naked as the Jews in the photographs we saw earlier.  There’s no denying that Cheyenne’s revenge on his father’s tormentor is viscerally powerful but it’s powerful in the wrong way.  The effect of this coup de théâtre is achieved by the nakedness of the octogenarian actor playing the supposedly nonagenarian Aloise Lange.  The shock comes from finding the gaunt flesh repulsive and the realisation that it is the actor’s body which is appalling to behold – the camera seems gripped by his wrinkled paunch as he stands shivering in the wind.  Heinz Lieven is well known in Germany but not to me and this seemed to intensify his physical humiliation – he was a real old man rather than an actor I could put into a context of other roles.

The very last scene, which also depends on the disappearance of costume, isn’t upsetting but it is confusing.  Back in Ireland, Mary’s mother is still waiting at the window, still hoping whenever the phone rings it will be her boy come back.  Like Midler in the previous sequence, she sees something that takes her breath away and makes her drop the phone.  It’s Cheyenne coming up the street, in an ordinary pair of jeans and a jacket, without his bouffant hair or make-up.   I suspect this ending is specious.  Having Cheyenne present himself to Mary’s mother is easier to bring off than having him return to his wife in civvies – she’d want to know why, whereas Mary’s mother reacts silently and as if Cheyenne were her long-lost son. Neither of them says a word:  I’m not sure Sorrentino and Penn know what sort of voice Cheyenne would have if he did.  But Penn’s tentative smile widens into a boyish, slightly sheepish grin and, because we don’t see the reunion with Jane, the effect is weirdly Oedipal.  It’s as if Cheyenne, his father dead and his own manhood proven, can come home to mother.

26 October 2011

[1] If you Google ‘Sean Penn – homophobe’, nearly all the first two pages of results refer to the accusations made by Mickey Rourke (backstage at a David Letterman show) in December 2008, when he and Penn were seen, correctly as it turned out, as the leading contenders for the Best Actor prize at the coming Academy Awards.  It seems hard to believe that Penn would have taken the trouble to include references to gay rights in his Oscar acceptance speech for Milk simply to contradict what Rourke had said.