Tag: Harry Dean Stanton

This Must Be The Place

David Byrne’s lyrics to the song “This Must Be the Place,” from which Paolo Sorrentino’s new film borrows its title, probably sums up my feelings watching the movie better than I can. “I feel numb – burn with a weak heart/I guess I must be having fun/the less we say about it the better/make it up as we go along… it’s okay. I know nothing’s wrong.”

“This Must Be the Place” is a beguiling film of quirky pleasures, unexpected themes and surprising depths. It’s the story of an aging ‘80s rock star named Cheyenne (Sean Penn) who in a state of depression goes on a road trip across America to hunt down the concentration camp guard who tortured his father. But it’s definitely not about rock ‘n roll, nor about America or Nazis or a lot else. And yet it’s a bizarrely funny movie with muted tones, surreal ingenuity and one of the wackiest performances of Sean Penn’s career.

Bathed in black nail polish, clothes, eyeliner and a mess of hair that outdoes even The Cure’s Robert Smith, Cheyenne is in his own world. He’s got a diminutive gaze of melancholy and depression along with his look that other Goth kids, like the teenager Mary (Eve Hewson) who hangs out with him, can only try and emulate. His lilting voice and occasional giggle is uncharacteristic of a rock star, but it’s the type of voice that people pay attention to when he speaks, like when he silences an elevator full of jabbering women on the subject of lipstick.

And yet the rest of his hometown of Dublin doesn’t seem to mind he’s in his own world. He maintains a healthy sex life with his blue-collar wife (Frances McDormand) and carries on conversations about women and music with others around town who don’t seem to care he is or was a rock star.

Cheyenne however doesn’t do much these days. He hasn’t played music in 20 years and he seems not at home in his strangely pristine and trendy mansion (“Why does it say ‘cuisine’ on the kitchen wall? I know it’s the kitchen”). Even his pool isn’t filled. His wife assures him he’s just confusing boredom with depression, so when he gets news his father has died and learns of his past during the war, he starts his American road trip to hunt down this Nazi war criminal.

Sorrentino, an Italian working in English for the first time, has a skewed view of Americana that’s probably more American than most patriotic films claim to be. These small towns in New Mexico and Utah each have their own rock star quirks, and it’s as if all of their oddities are projected onto Cheyenne and back. He takes a trip to see the world’s largest pistachio, performs “This Must Be the Place” with a 12-year-old, talks with David Byrne himself as he executes his latest project and even meets the man who invented the rolling suitcase (a wonderful cameo by Harry Dean Stanton).

We never see Sean Penn sing, nor do we hear the songs that made him a star, so more time is focused on these minor figures he encounters. But it’s an important distinction, because these numerous caricatures help turn Cheyenne into a real person. It seems as if deep down behind all the makeup, gimmicky vignettes and cinematography that makes every image look like it would be an appropriately bleak album cover, “This Must Be the Place” is a simple coming-of-age story about a rock star he isn’t now and never was.

3 stars

Seven Psychopaths

“Seven Psychopaths” proves you should never judge a movie by its title. Playwright turned movie director Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”) starts with the title and knowingly ropes you in to a movie you both did and didn’t expect it to be.

It’s a movie about movies, it’s about writers with writer’s block, it’s about how psychopathic we must be to enjoy a movie about psychopaths, and it’s one of the more twistedly clever movies of the year.

Colin Farrell as Marty is not one of the movie’s seven psychopaths, but he must be crazy to think he can get any work done on a screenplay when he’s an alcoholic writer and Irishman. All he has so far is the title, “Seven Psychopaths,” which is good enough for everyone, because a title like that should write itself. But he doesn’t know who the psychopaths are, and he doesn’t want them to be violent or the movie to be a mindless bloodbath. One of them, he thinks, could be a Buddhist.

But this isn’t good enough for Billy (Sam Rockwell), a crook who kidnaps dogs and returns them for reward money along with his partner Hans (Christopher Walken). Billy suggests one of the psychopaths could be based on a local serial killer called the Jack of Diamonds, who goes around killing members of crime syndicates. All the plots inevitably intertwine when Billy kidnaps crime boss Charlie’s (Woody Harrelson) shih tzu puppy and he comes looking for them.

The twist of “Seven Psychopaths” however is that this is the set up. The title itself is a ploy. Suddenly on the run, Marty wonders that if this were the story of his movie, what if the second half was just three guys sitting in the desert and talking? The movie calls attention to itself in the biggest way possible. It’s writing the movie as it goes, recognizing the over-stylized shootout isn’t as fun or as funny as it seems, showing the seams of its plot and acknowledging that even a sincere attempt at life lessons can be phony.

It’s not quite “Pulp Fiction” because it has its own set of rules instead of none at all. It’s not quite “Snatch” because it’s smarter than that and only uses the movie’s ideas as a template for parody. And it’s not quite “Adaptation” because at the end of the day this is still a screwball, blood-drenched mob comedy.

“Seven Psychopaths” is its own movie. It’s got layers, as it says. It’s a movie inside itself that doesn’t play out in ways you would expect, but then does on a technicality.

At its core, the film works because McDonagh’s dialogue isn’t funny just because it’s self-aware, and it doesn’t waste the talent on screen just to make a point about movies like this. Woody Harrelson is probably best, using obscenely large guns and other props like a wheelchair to always teeter on comedic and menacing and make his own legacy as an iconic and memorable movie villain.

And McDonagh isn’t just a stylistic copycat. He backs away from most of the pop culture references and focuses carefully on the proper aesthetic of the action comedy dream sequence and how he can tweak it. Take note of the maudlin score and storybook monologue during a montage telling the story of Zacharia (Tom Waits), another serial killer specializing in killing serial killers who acted with a Bonnie Parker partner in crime and fell in love.

The question is whether or not “Seven Psychopaths” earns its stripes. The movie is so self-aware that it even calls itself out on its own trap. These characters can’t necessarily be liked, the movie really can only end one way and the insights really can only be skin deep. If “Seven Psychopaths” is a movie within a movie, it seems to say how you couldn’t possibly enjoy a movie like this as you’re watching it.

3 stars