"Cyrus" (2010)

Mommy Dearest, You’re Mine Forever

In “Cyrus,” a creepy-funny comedy about man and boy love — not for each other — the actor Jonah Hill enters with a polite smile that is likely to send a chill straight up your neck, leaving your little hairs aflutter. As the title character, a 21-year-old man-child with a manic stare, an endless supply of neatly laundered button-down shirts and a seriously unhealthy attachment to his mother, he looks like the kind of guy who has been setting fire to the neighborhood cats, the one everyone says seemed so nice after the cops dig up the bodies. Best known for playing testy smart alecks in comedies like “Superbad,” Mr. Hill taps the spirit of Norman Bates so well he quickly pushes this comedy into horror.

Cyrus doesn’t use knives when he goes for the jugular (though he flashes one in a slyly funny moment): his weapons of choice are trembling lips and watery eyes, which he uses against his single mother, Molly (Marisa Tomei), with brutal efficiency. Together they live in a trim bungalow in an outlier area of Los Angeles, far from the city’s moneyed hills and shoreline. There’s something generic about their house, which looks less lived in than indifferently art directed, with the usual bric-a-brac and strategic family pictures. But then there’s something generic about this movie too, with its dreary, dimensionless digital photography that dribbles from character to character, all of whom are underwritten and largely in the service of the joke.

 

The joke, though, is pretty killer: Cyrus hasn’t been weaned. Well, not literally, at least as far as we see. (Ew.) Let’s just say that he has mommy issues, which rise like swamp gas after Molly starts seeing John (John C. Reilly). They meet at a party soon after the movie opens when she catches him, drunk, urinating on the host’s yard. She finds this charming, an inexplicable reaction for a woman who appears sober, sane and not obviously desperate enough to jump at the first sight of an unzipped member. But Molly is a conceit not a character, a means to a narrative end: she flirts with John (“nice penis”), then joins him on the dance floor and later in bed. A couple is born. Enter Cyrus, not laughing.

The writer-directors, the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, don’t know much about women or don’t care about Molly (maybe both). Even so, they were smart to cast Ms. Tomei. Their movie’s heart if not its focus, she has taken a great outline for a character — the sexy smother-mother with the possibly psycho adult son — and filled it with the gently melancholic eroticism that worked so well in “The Wrestler.” The Duplasses exploit her physicality less egregiously than that movie did, even if they use her body like bait. Here her attractiveness serves the story because it embodies the unspeakable undertow of the movie’s mother-and-son dynamic. No wonder Cyrus only has eyes for Mom: Look at her!

This is perilous ground — incest as comedy — which the Duplasses navigate surprisingly well for a surprisingly long time. When Cyrus walks into the bathroom where Molly is taking a shower the first night John stays over, what makes the scene funny is John’s startled reaction. (Mr. Reilly does confused wonderfully well.) What makes it unsettling is that Cyrus doesn’t acknowledge, with a word or glance, John’s admonition that Molly is in the shower. He just opens and closes the door, shutting himself in and John out with a certainty that speaks to the intimate nature of his relationship with his mother, as well as his proprietary claim on her. John is in Molly’s bedroom, but it’s Cyrus who has access to her body.

The two men are soon tugging on that body, hard. A fast worker, John clears out of his lonely-guy digs and moves in with Molly and Cyrus. Like the other characters, John is a rough sketch and not an especially appealing one, but Mr. Reilly and the filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of the actor’s talent for making genially hapless characters likable. John doesn’t have much going for him, and in a way he’s more of a blank than Cyrus, without any obvious driving passions beyond Molly and his own loneliness. Cyrus, by contrast, composes music and takes photographs. He doesn’t have friends, but neither does John, beyond his tolerant ex-wife (Catherine Keener, the standard bearer for groovy, smart women).

That the line between Cyrus and John isn’t all that great is richly, perversely suggestive, but the Duplasses don’t recognize this or perhaps don’t know how to develop it within the narrow limits they’ve set. This might be laziness, though, like their other choices, including filing the edges off Molly, it also feels commercially strategic. Despite their indie cred, the Duplasses are mainstream, hence the movie’s status quo finish. “Cyrus” is more finely tuned than their earlier movies (“The Puffy Chair,” “Baghead”), but it shares a similar, almost aggressive lack of ambition. John doesn’t work hard and neither do the Duplasses, who don’t want their audiences to break a sweat either. That’s too bad, because “Cyrus” is more interesting and fun when you’re recoiling at the effrontery of its comedy and not its conventionality.

Written and directed by Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass; director of photography, Jas Shelton; edited by Jay Deuby; music by Michael Andrews; production designer, Annie Spitz; costumes by Roemehl Hawkins; produced by Michael Costigan; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

WITH: John C. Reilly (John), Jonah Hill (Cyrus), Marisa Tomei (Molly), Catherine Keener (Jamie) and Matt Walsh (Tim).