Tragi-comic: THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND

Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island is another R-rated comedy about a man-child shuffling slowly toward self-improvement — but, true to Apatow at his best, it’s an affecting, funny one that rings with well-earned truth and sentiment. He knows what his imitators—so many we’re now well past the other side of the pale copies flooding theaters after his 2007 smash Knocked Up —have rarely been able to figure out. In order to make this plot work, we need duration and specificity, the stuff of James L. Brooks or Cameron Crowe or Mike Nichols when their dramedies are really cooking. Apatow can have that same sensitive touch, the confidence to let scenes and plot threads stretch out and amble along, and the wisdom to work closely with his actors to generate the kind of perfect hand-in-glove fit of role and performer. This new work is his best film since 2009's Funny People, that wise, bitter, rambling, melancholic movie that gave Adam Sandler his best role playing a big comedy star whose silly movies don’t quite feed his soul the way a happier life would. Now Staten Island takes Pete Davidson—the current SNL star whose painfully confessional "Weekend Update" standup bits are sometimes as awkwardly funny as his acting in the (admittedly often terribly written) sketches is occasionally cringeworthy—and makes with him his finest role.

The focus is on an emotionally stunted 24-year-old high-school dropout stoner whose deep discomfort with his own feelings and dizzyingly low self-esteem leads him into standoffish encounters with everyone he knows and loves. And those doesn't, too. He can’t handle change well, and therefore hopes by keeping his ambition low and resisting big life moments — relationships, graduations, moving out, getting work, seeing his family members grow — he’ll avoid that pain. When he was seven years old, his firefighter dad died on the job. Davidson vividly plays this pain behind the arrested adolescence; he’s prickly, sometimes slyly charming, often zoned out, but always fragile and clenched. Apatow, who co-wrote with Davidson and Dave Sirus, allows him to start in a truly dismal place, and lets the film stretch to over two hours, generously granting this troubled person the patience and space to slowly, painfully turn a corner in his life. That Davidson draws upon elements of his own life story to make up this character is surely part of what gives it the spark of realism to the character’s psychology, which in turn allows us to understand all the more acutely from where he’s coming. It’s no spoiler to say the young man’s life is not totally solved in the end. But we can hope it’s enough of a start that he’ll believe it. And because we spend so long with him and the cast of characters around him, we can start to believe it ourselves.

The movie has the typically Apatowian character-driven ear for long, semi-improvised scenes that build up rapport between characters, and the sweetness that cuts the vulgarity. Ostensibly a comedy, it’s perhaps the least interested in punchlines of any of his films. It’s funny in the way life is, accidentally in fumbling torrents of awkward tension, or sweetly in characters’ joshing connections, or in the absurdity of escalating bad decisions. It accommodates different moods, and approaches with tenderness its characters flaws. (There’s a sequence in a pharmacy at the midpoint that I saw as Apatow’s version of the Safdie brothers’ sense of bleakly comic anxiety in films like Uncut Gems and Good Time, but with a kinder view of his characters' fates.) The slowly developed throughlines involve Davidson’s character’s attempts to find a life he’ll be okay with living. An early moment in which he casually talks about killing himself is harrowingly believable. So his often inadvertent betterment process involves hanging with a posse of ne’er-do-well drug dealer friends (Ricky Velez, Lou Wilson, and Moises Arias), and a longtime girl friend (Bel Powley) he, much to her frustration, hesitates to make official. Even more fraught is his reaction to his family dynamics, as his younger sister (Maude Apatow) goes away to college, and his lonely mother (Marisa Tomei) finally starts dating again after 17 years of widowhood. The new man (Bill Burr) is also a fireman, a source of obvious tension for the young man who has yet to process his father’s death. Though he’s scarred over with hard edges and surly insults—not to mention the cavalcade of scribbled tattoos over his body— this death is still a raw emotional wound that bleeds easily with little prodding.

It’s the way Apatow and Davidson let the totally zonkered futility of his emotional state in the early passages play so unvarnished and uncomfortable, even in the context of a tone that accommodates bursts of laughs, that somehow can draw in a sympathetic audience even as his behavior clearly pushes people in his life away. His mother and sister worry about him, his mother’s new beau gingerly tests out possible avenues for bonding while trying to avoid getting hurt, or messing up his potential new relationship. Eventually, there’s room for growth, but the length of the film, and the willingness to let the plot wander, following characters not on one specific, over-determined arc, but on a winding path that maybe, just maybe bring them to slightly happier places, feel so full and finely observed. It doesn’t race to big gags or push hard to make recurring bits. It is light and weighty, an unhurried, confidently close film that builds to sentimental moments and earns them by playing them softly, and putting in the work building characters we can care about and believe in. It’s the sort of movie where we can start to anticipate—and dread—characters’ reactions to new variables, and can breathe a sigh of relief when they make a better choice, or smile as they find new comfort in a new task, an unexpected source of accomplishment and growth, or even just a late-night singalong where they all realize they don’t know the words but sing at the top of their lungs anyway. And isn’t that what making something of your life is all about?

Swing Shift: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

The latest product from the Marvel Studios factory is Spider-Man: Homecoming, a co-production with Columbia Pictures, that company making less an admission of failure and more a signal of strong showbiz jealousies. The Sony subsidiary hasn’t been able to make a Spider-Man feature as good as Sam Raimi’s since letting him go, but surely the powers that be were only interested in loosening the reins on their rights to the character when they saw the consistent huge grosses and quality control over at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They didn’t want to do right by the character so much as do right by their producers and stockholders. Still, the result is precisely what you’d hope and expect from bringing in the people who brought us the whole Avengers product line. It’s brightly lit and full of good-humored banter, features a great cast of familiar faces playing colorful characters, and stops every so often for a dazzlement of colorful CG. Though the formula’s getting tired, this new entry manages a high degree of charm and fast-paced entertainment (and even a few genuine surprises). In addition to the predictable polish and routine beats of a Marvel plot machine, this widget has a sweetness and an energy that makes it slightly better than average. It’s good fun.

Picking up during the events of last year’s Captain America: Civil War, where this new interpretation of Spidey was first introduced recruited by Iron Man to be a potential second-string Avenger, Homecoming finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) initially excited to be one of the gang. (This movie’s biggest uphill climb is having to bounce its continuity out of what was easily the MCU’s worst movie, a dull grey 147-minute slog.)  Alas, his dreams will not be coming true any time soon. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gifts him a souped-up supersuit and tells him to stick to being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The boy’s just fifteen, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to be a real hero when he’s older. This leaves the kid antsy and eager to prove himself, and allows the movie to stretch out with what’s always best about Spidey’s appeal: his average, every day, everyman problems. He has homework, an extracurricular academic challenge team, a cheerfully nerdy best friend (Jacob Batalon), an unrequited crush (Laura Harrier), a bully (Tony Revolori), a sweet prickly teammate (Zendaya), and a kind aunt (Marisa Tomei). He has a lot on his plate, plus the whole sneaking out every evening to patrol the streets, swinging from buildings to stop bike thieves and ATM bandits. 

Writer-director Jon Watts (of the small, tense, kids-in-over-their-heads thriller Cop Car) and his five co-writers understand the inherent charm of Spider-Man. They make him a relatable stressed-out teenager, just trying to fit in and do well at school while testing his powers. (They’re great, after all, and so, too, are his responsibilities.) With a bounce in its step, the movie makes like its hero and juggles the demands placed upon it quite skillfully. It weaves itself into the fabric of the MCU with better deftness than some of its inferiors, rooting its villain (The Vulture, played by Batman and Birdman himself, Michael Keaton) motivation in the aftermath of The Avengers. One of the more memorable villains in this mega-franchise, his backstory has him with a contract to clean up the damage from the alien battle, a lucrative deal that gets pulled when SHIELD classifies the high-tech debris. Now he’s flying in a makeshift jet-propelled wingspan, making his money on the black market, smuggling gadgets stolen from the various film’s climactic calamities (Winter Soldier’s D.C. craters, Ultron’s rattled fictional city, and so on). He and Peter – little guys hoping to make big marks – both have struggles proving themselves in this new outsized ecosphere of heroes and villains, which gives their clash a little charge. Keaton’s world-weariness plays nicely against Holland’s adorably boyish happy-to-be-here excitement, making for a compelling conflict.

Because the bad guy’s a local low-level troublemaker, he first shows up on Peter’s radar. Since the boy has trouble convincing Stark’s assistant (Jon Favreau) to take his calls, he feels obligated to put a stop to the mystery man’s bad deeds as he continually crosses paths with the evil plot. All this and the big dance, too. There’s the usual roster of fun character actors popping up to give the zippy plot some added wit and texture (Donald Glover, Bokeem Woodbine, Hannibal Buress, Angourie Rice, Martin Starr, and Michael Mando among the pleasant surprises popping up in tiny roles). They keep things pleasant and crackling with an agreeable comic charge between big splashy two-page spreads of action – leaping between buildings and off monuments, tussling with henchmen and saving civilians – that make for the usual superhero shenanigans. These are all suitably loud and explosive, but also swing with Spidey’s nimble acrobatics. Watts has managed to make a movie sparkling with enough fun and invention that its small piece pumps some life back to the larger franchise puzzle. It simply feels good to spend two hours with a character whose biggest conflict is wanting to contribute more positive impact in the world than he can manage. It’s easy to root for him.

Holiday Schmaltz: LOVE THE COOPERS

The opening scene of Love the Coopers finds the Cooper family matriarch signing the last of her Christmas cards. “Love, The Coopers,” she writes with a flourish. The title of the movie, however, lacks the comma, making it less a warm present to us all, and more a demand to love the family we’ll be spending the next two hours with. This directive would go over easier if we were given sharply drawn characters who come into focus quickly. But we don’t. It’s a sprawling holiday dramedy dripping with sap and spreading its large ensemble amongst several connected plotlines, some far more interesting than others. It’s a sloppy Christmassy mess, but because a cast of likable charmers plays the characters, the movie has its moments anyway.

Opening on the morning of Christmas Eve, the screenplay by Steven Rogers (Stepmom) finds a large extended family all over Pittsburgh in a rush to get last minute holiday shopping and planning out of the way before the night’s big family dinner. It’s a belabored, scattered setup, hoping to gain some interest out of mystery, keeping the family connections murky until they crystallize as the people congregate around the cookbook-photo-spread Christmas supper. Overly expository narration (by Steve Martin, oddly drained of humor, and oozing storybook affect) tells us a lot, but illuminates little as we find a variety of small human dramas played broad. There’s a layer of schmaltz slathered all over an awkward mix of bad sitcom pacing and drooling manipulation.

There’s a divorced dad (Ed Helms) trying to hide his job loss from his ex-wife (Alex Borstein). Their painfully uncomfortable teen son (Timothée Chalamet) wants his first kiss, their youngest son (Maxwell Simkins) wants a bike, and their toddler daughter (Blake Baumgartner) has learned a curse word. There’s a kind old man (Alan Arkin) with a platonic crush on a sweet waitress (Amanda Seyfried). There’s a couple in their sixties (Diane Keaton and John Goodman) happy to host a family holiday for one last time, since they plan to use it to announce their impending divorce. There’s a lonely middle-aged woman (Marisa Tomei) who’s caught shoplifting (by cop Anthony Mackie) and so might be late for dinner. Finally, there’s a cynical liberal playwright (Olivia Wilde) who Meets Cute with a conservative soldier (Jake Lacy) in an airport bar. Between these stories are stock-footage-ready shots of snowy streets, Santas, and more carolers around every corner than I’ve ever seen in real life.

That’s quite a lot of plot to juggle, especially when it’s not all that deftly edited, and written with thin tin-eared stereotypes. (I didn’t even mention the elderly aunt (June Squibb) whose dementia is used exclusively for laughs.) It develops convolutedly, layered with flashing flashbacks to many characters’ pasts. You might think that’d bring extra heft to the emotional stakes, but it often confuses the issue, mistaking whats for whys when it comes to fleshing out the characters. Director Jessie Nelson (with her first directing credit since 2001’s I Am Sam) cross-cuts unevenly, allowing one character’s cross-town car trip to take as long as another’s grocery shopping, caroling, sledding, and cooking combined. This all could’ve benefited from a smoother approach to ensemble storytelling, more Altman-esque, or at least on the level of a Love Actually or The Best Man Holiday.

The movie spends its time lurching from storyline to storyline, haphazardly developed, largely unconvincing, tonally confused, both too calculated and weirdly adrift. And yet, as frazzled as this setup is, some of it works, and the predictable payoffs are rather sweet in their own ways. The talented cast is too good, especially when Nelson allows them real sensitive moments of connection, to let a sloppy script drag them down. When Keaton and Goodman argue, and when they wistfully reminisce about the good times and the bad they’ve shared over forty years of marriage, there’s real emotional weight. And in the airport scenes between Wilde and Lacy there develops a low-key romantic comedy that’s rather lovely in its chemistry and prickly warmth.

There’s almost enough gooey goodness in the moments that work to override the bad, like the final moments, which reveal the narrator is not omniscient, as has seemed to be the case, but instead a character we meet who has no possible way of knowing everything he’s been telling us. So it’s not a particularly good movie overall. It’s clumsy, obvious, full of clunky failed comedy and overtly telegraphed messages. (Could you guess it’ll be about valuing family togetherness and appreciating what you have right in front of you?) But it also has enough earnest sentiment to make it moderately effective on any big softies in the audience. I have to admit, from time to time, I was one of them. There’s no compelling reason to recommend Love the Coopers except the fleeting moments of button-pushing emotion, which might be enough if you’re willing to let yourself give in and be an easy target for that sort of thing. 

Catching Up on 2011: Twists and Turns Edition

In Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, Thomas Dekker stars as a college student who harbors a crush on his dumb surfer roommate (Chris Zylka).  He - Dekker, not the roommate - is a troubled guy, trying to figure out who he is and find his place in the world. Chowing down in the cafeteria, he confides in his best friend (Haley Bennett). They chat about the usual college topics: relationships and classes. Their rapport has a lived-in chemistry. They have fun being with each other and, consequently, they’re fun to watch. Around this little R-rated collegiate comedy spins an increasingly paranoid frenzy of plot that includes missing persons, a jealous lesbian witch (Roxane Mesquida), people in animal masks, a flirty party girl (Juno Temple), a doomsday cult, a pot-fueled prophet (James Duval), and the End of the World. It’s a fevered concoction, like a messy, madly uneven collaboration between David Lynch, Richard Kelly, and Diablo Cody. It’s also distinctly Araki, harkening back to the mix of tactile sensual imagery and commitment to heightened cartoonish grotesquery that he was deploying early in his career in wild, scattershot efforts like 1995’s The Doom Generation. He’s dialed back the intensity in the interim and, though it shares the DNA, Kaboom benefits from Araki’s more mature, experienced eye. The film’s no less of a mess, but it feels significantly more considered in its choices, a kind of careful craziness, a kind of tidy disorder to be found. It’s a sexy, vibrant jumble of weirdness and hilarity that is uneven but entertaining right up until its rushed climax that sucks the fun out of it all. To a certain extent, this feels like a deeply strange, very funny, sometimes creepy, often brilliant TV show with one or two seasons shoved into 80 minutes. With a complicated narrative structure of interwoven and overlapping hallucinations, amorous fantasies, drug trips, and bad dreams that culminates (spoiler!) in a literal apocalyptic explosion, the film keeps Dekker at the center, grounding it all. On a plot level it may be crazy and unsatisfying, but the metaphor rings true. To searching college kids floating around in hormonal ennui, the stakes of self-discovery can seem downright cataclysmic in proportions. 

A sturdy ensemble anchors The Lincoln Lawyer, a fairly standard legal thriller, the kind with twists that are only surprising to someone who has never experienced a legal thriller of any kind, not even an episode of Law & Order or a thick, forgettable airport novel. The script from John Romano, from a novel by Michael Connelly, gives Matthew McConaughey a rare suitable role that finds a way to channel his default sleaziness into an actual character. He’s an L.A. defense attorney working out of his car when he’s hired by a rich guy (Ryan Phillippe) who needs to beat an assault charge. The problem is that McConaughey begins to have good reason to think that his client really did brutally beat a prostitute and feels sick about defending him. He thinks his way through the criminal justice system, trying to alternately outwit and work with prosecutors (Marisa Tomei and Josh Lucas), cops (John Leguizamo and Bryan Cranston), an investigator (William H. Macy), and an inmate (Michael Peña). It’s all a slick bore. Now, this might sound like nitpicking, but the thing that most bugged me about this mediocre entertainment were the wobbly little zooms that director Brad Furman would drop into scenes for no apparent reason. A standard dialogue scene would be humming right along and then, zoom, we zip a little closer to the person talking. Sometimes, the zoom would take us back a few inches, just to mix things up. While I’ll admit that it’s definitely a minor stylistic tick and certainly not one that pervades every scene, it’s also indicative of a larger failing of Furman’s. This is a film that feels as if it’s breathlessly trying to become a better movie, but just can’t make it. Every little tick in the style just struck me as an empty gesture, a failed attempt to make the uninteresting interesting.

Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, handsome and clean-cut in a way that invites easy empathy) is a young man who leaves the family business, a mortuary run by his father (Rutger Hauer), to attend seminary school. Flash forward to just before he is scheduled to become a priest. He’s lost his faith. He’s not sure he believes in God anymore, even (or is that especially?) when he witnesses a freak accident and kneels over a dying woman, reluctantly giving her the last rites. The head of his program (Toby Jones) asks him to reconsider his decision to abandon the church and gets him to agree to a trip to Rome where he will enroll in a class for exorcism training from the esteemed Father Xavier (Ciarán Hinds). Once there, he finds he still has his doubts. Aren’t the possessed simply mentally ill? He’s taken under the wing of a grave master exorcist (crinkled, latter-day Anthony Hopkins) and finds much to test his doubt. This is Mikael Håfström’s The Rite, which screenwriter Michael Petroni claims, in line with a dubious horror tradition, to be suggested by a true story. It coasts a bit too far on its easy pop-psychological pseudo-religious conflict, but has such a tremendously oppressive sense of somber, suffocating Catholic dread that I couldn’t help but be jangled about. The actors are fantastic all, matching the film’s earnestness and solemnity. It’s an essentially standard paranormal creeper, in many ways just shiny trash, but the deathly unsmiling tone of the film, matched with the high production value, especially the sleek cinematography from Ben Davis who photographs Vatican City in gorgeous, ominous ways, creates a tone of overwhelming skin-crawling danger. I fell into the film’s mood, matching its earnest approach with an unexpectedly earnest response. There’s a creeping sense of an invisible, evil spiritual threat that set my teeth grinding and my feet bouncing. It worked on me. Handsomely mounted and scarily serious, the film’s an effective freak-out.

Love is a Battlefield: CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a romantic comedy that tries to do something new but in the process finds only stale ways to do the same old things. It’s a film with a deeply talented ensemble that walks through intertwining rom-com plotlines, but at the core the whole thing is flat and unconvincing. It has one foot in low-key observational humor and another in broad sentimental jokiness with no idea how to reconcile the two. As a result, the film lurches from moment to moment and, though individual scenes and performances can be quite good, the whole thing is nothing more than a disappointment.

The film stars Steve Carell and Julianne Moore as a married couple of twenty-five years. We are quickly made aware of their deteriorating relationship in an opening scene that makes economical use of editing and framing. We see a bustling restaurant from the point of view of several pairs of feet in fancy shoes, one after the other paired off playing footsie. Then, we cut to two pairs of feet that are stationary and separated with shoes of decidedly lower quality and flashiness. These feet belong to Carell and Moore as they sit with their dessert menus trying to decide what they want. “Why don’t we say what we want at the same time?” Carell suggests. So they do. He says “crème brûlée.” She says “a divorce.”

From there on out we follow Carell as he tries to get back into the dating game with the help of a ladies’ man (Ryan Gosling) he runs into at a local bar. Meanwhile, his soon-to-be-ex wife makes tentative steps towards an office romance with her company’s accountant (Kevin Bacon). Sprinkled throughout the main thrust of the plot, their thirteen-year-old son (Jonah Bobo) wrestles with his crush on the teenage girl (Analeigh Tipton) who babysits his little sister (Joey King) while the ladies’ man may have finally found the one perfect girl (Emma Stone) who will make him decide to settle down.

Writer Dan Fogelman, who has also written Tangled and Cars (how’s that for variety?), weaves the various plot threads together as clumsily as he handles the tone. The characters are sometimes well drawn and other times seem to be barely more than a one-note joke. Take Marisa Tomei, who shows up in a handful of scenes in barely more than a cameo, for an example that’s indicative of the strange approach the film takes. Her character, a woman who is picked up at the bar by Carell, is made the butt of relentless sexist jokes. She’s ridiculed for being aggressive in her pursuit of a relationship, then ridiculed for later expressing surprise that Carell doesn’t call her back. When she reappears in a crowd of people during the climax, all she can do is sit on the sidelines and shoot daggers with her gaze as she flips him the bird. What a waffling, cruel way to treat a character, not only by the film but also by the characters within it.

Similar problems exist with the Gosling character. Now, Gosling is super charming and his rakish role works just fine, but by the time the film makes an attempt at deepening the character, it feels forced. It’s fun to see his wandering ways tamed by Emma Stone, who flips the power balance in the relationship, but it doesn’t feel like it should move as fast as it does. Far more honest and patient is the way Bobo’s puppy love is handled, at least until it becomes precocious mawkish speechifying in the final twenty minutes before returning to subtlety in the end, giving him the final shot of the film. In fact, his is the most compelling of the plot lines. Maybe this should have been his coming-of-age story instead of an I-still-love-my-ex divorcee’s fantasy. Carell and Moore do all the heavy lifting with characterization that the screenplay doesn't quite give them. They communicate more in body language than they do through speaking.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who directed last year’s I Love You, Phillip Morris, a terrific raunchy based-on-a-true-story farce, do their best impression of a mid-80’s James L. Brooks or perhaps a mid-90’s Cameron Crowe, but the script just isn’t up to their level of craftsmanship. There are scenes here that shine. I especially loved a late backyard confrontation that features every character’s secret revealed in a believably funny and tense way. Perhaps what the film lacks most is an intensity and immediacy that comes forth in that moment and in others like that opening scene, or some of the material between Bobo and Tipton, or the first real date between Gosling and Stone. There’s great stuff here, but not, unfortunately, a great movie.

Duplass Filmmaking: CYRUS

I’m sure it’s a backhanded compliment, or, more likely, not a compliment at all, to say that the films of the brothers Duplass always leave me with a deeply felt sense of nothing. From their first film, the light but likable road-trip film Puffy Chair (2005), to Baghead (2008), their sophomore effort and experiment in meta-horror, I find their work to be slight whiffs. They’re not entirely without merit, and I basically enjoyed them both, the former more than the latter, but they don’t stick. With their new film Cyrus, the brothers have made a step into mainstream filmmaking, of a sort, with a pseudo-indie featuring big names (John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, Catherine Keener) while keeping the shaggy slightness of their previous films entirely intact. In fact, Cyrus is probably the best of their three features, despite ending one scene too soon where Puffy Chair found satisfying open-endedness and Baghead became self-defeating in overambitious genre tweaking.

But, before I go any farther, it must be asserted that Cyrus is in fact an often enjoyable movie. Opening with Reilly as a depressed divorcee, drunkenly seeking a new girlfriend at a party to which his ex-wife (Keener) invited him, the movie immediately makes clear that the loose, improvisational, often casually funny Duplass style has remained intact. Singing obnoxiously along to the hosts’ stereo and comparing himself to Shrek somehow wins Reilly the affection of a very warm and caring woman (Tomei). They start dating, but the other shoe drops, as it must in screen romances, when it is revealed that Tomei has, in the form of a casually threatening Jonah Hill, a 21-year-old unemployed mama’s boy living with her. Their relationship is very close and Hill is not about to let some interloper trash it.

I laughed enough at Cyrus, but the comedy seems almost beside the point. The acting here creates characters that feel raw and untamed. The exchanges and interactions between them, reportedly heavily improvised, are fumbling and offhandedly, almost accidentally, humorous. Reilly and Tomei create characters that are immediately sympathetic and understandable. It is this sympathy that pulls me through, rolling over my quibbles with the plotting as the film finds a comfort zone in its plot points then seems to get stuck on repeat for a bit before it can move on.

I liked the leads; it’s what kept me watching. But what kept me interested was Jonah Hill who is funny, yes, but also a creepy and deeply strange character here. The son’s attempts to insert himself between his mother and her boyfriend to slowly sabotage a burgeoning relationship are subtle and devious emotional manipulation. It’s to the credit of all involved that the film never goes broad with his antics. It’s slowly creepy and scarily simple the ways he unsettles Reilly and plays with Tomei’s emotions.

So this is a funny, odd, enjoyable little movie, well-acted and worthy of attention. That much is worth reiterating before Cyrus becomes doomed to be known as that movie with the crazy zooms, as some cinephiles would have you know. But those zooms are weird, often seemingly unmotivated and distracting in their eagerness to suddenly leap back or plunge in. At the movie’s best, the zooms are barely noticeable; at its worst, they’re off-putting.

I first saw Cyrus at a festival screening some months ago, catching up with it again just the other day as it moves through an expanding release. Both times, I found myself having a good time, more or less, but the months between found my memory of enjoyment evaporating. This is a movie that delivers fun on impact, but fades fast. In that way, this film is definitely of a piece with the Duplass brothers’ other films. They’re charming guys and smart filmmakers. I look forward to the day they make a film that lingers.