This Must Be the Place
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, written by Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello, Element Pictures
Director Paolo Sorrentino’s film This Must Be the Place takes its title from a Talking Heads called “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” off their seminal album Stop Making Sense. Featuring a performance of the song by David Byrne himself, the film won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Written by Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello, This Must Be the Place stars Sean Penn Cheyenne, an aging, retired and disaffected rock star who adopts his father’s lifelong quest to hunt down and revenge himself on the Nazi soldier who tormented him during the Holocaust.
Cheyenne, formerly of the wildly successful Cheyenne and the Fellows, now lives in a modest pile in Dublin. Modeled on Robert Smith from The Cure, Penn is literally engulfed by teased black hair, lipstick and slap, and the requisite black clothes with too many zippers to be useful. His aging Goth speaks softly, does the weekly shop, hangs at the mall with a teenage fan cum friend, and plays handball in his drained pool with his wife – the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand – who sometimes lets him win.
Cheyenne drifts through his existence in a dulled haze of regret and malaise, a completely ineffectual and useless man-child well-loved by his inner circle of quirky Irish friends but laughed at behind his back by modern Dublin society. He suspects, he confides to his wife, he is a bit depressed.
The films moves at the same pace Cheyenne shambles about his life, which is to say: slow. Entirely too much time is spent following Cheyenne around his daily life in Dublin, to the point where it seems this really must be the place, and it’s a lot more “Hotel California” than “Heaven”.
Eventually, Cheyenne’s father dies. Estranged for 30 years, Cheyenne hasn’t been back to the US in almost as long, but he decides to journey back to his Orthodox Jewish roots to sit shiva for his father, a Holocaust survivor. He ends up inheriting the files his father has kept and worked on for years as he hunted his Nazi tormenter from the camps. At first reluctant to accept his father’s quest for vengeance, Cheyenne decides to continue his father’s search mostly as an act of rebellion against Mordecai Midler, a professional Nazi hunter played by Judd Hirsch, who tells Cheyenne point-blank that the Nazi his father was hunting wasn’t that big of a catch after all.
There is a lot of deus ex machina in this film. Unsurprisingly, a proud Texas businessman Cheyenne just happens to meet trusts Cheyenne to deliver his beloved pick-up truck back home while he is ordered overseas on business. Handily equipped with a ride, Cheyenne embarks on a cross-country tour of America on a slow, lazy and meandering quest to find the ex-Nazi guard. Along the way, he encounters all that makes the US weird and wonderful – surreal encounters with Native Americans, tattoo artists, bitter old schoolteachers and heartbreaking diner waitresses. But as strange as Americans may be, none of them hold a candle to an aging Goth commandeering a 4x4 down America’s byways on the trail of his man. The deus ex machina appears again later in the form of Harry Dean Stanton, who not only holds a key to Cheyenne’s quest, but also nicely rounds out the iconography of the 1980s alternative teen experience.
While a darling of the critics, the most amazing thing about this film is that it is written by non-Americans. Applauded for their ear for American cadence and dialogue, Sorrentino and Contarello capture equally well the stereotypical accents of New York Jew, Midwestern School Spinster and Southwestern White Trash as Cheyenne travels across America (although, I swear I saw “screenplay translation” attributed to someone in the end credit roll; if that’s true then whoever you are, Unsung Translator, kudos to you for your excellent job!). The pacing, as I mentioned, is infuriatingly slow. I like a slow movie; some of my best friends are slow movies. But slowness needs to have a point, usually to serve a certain cinematographic scope. Unfortunately, I found the cinematography in this film neither particularly original or clever – never once was my breath taken away by the vastness of the landscape, or even the details Penn’s face (and if anyone has a face with a view, it is Sean Penn).
While the dialog itself is wonderfully natural in its form and delivery, it is peppered with the musings of every 40-something contemplating how they ever managed to arrive at middle age: “Why is Lady Gaga--?” he musingly asks his wife, letting the incomplete question hang in the air. “Life is full of beautiful things,” he says later, apparently the sum total of his experience as an adult thus far. “You’re delusional,” he argues with a child who insists the song “Home” is by the band Arcade Fire, “that’s just a cover. The song is by the Talking Heads.” It’s surprising he didn’t tell some damn kids to get off his lawn.
There’s no denying the very solid cast, from veterans Hirsch and McDormand to newcomer Eve Hewson. And while there is something undeniably delightful watching Penn walk around in Goth drag, he infuses the aging, sensitive Cheyenne with too many affectations to be believable. He sounds like a combination of Quentin Crisp and Truman Capote and has the wisdom of a child with an old soul, if you believe in that sort of thing. I find Penn too hard of an actor to play it soft. Of course he’s excellent in all sorts of roles, but even his Harvey Milk had an edge that Penn played with to great effect. Here, he just seems slightly autistic.
Rife with heavy-handed symbolism – Cheyenne constantly drags around either a shopping cart or a wheeled carry-on Get it? It’s his baggage! – the film becomes pedantic and eventually disingenuous. At one point, Cheyenne muses to a friend’s mother who is mourning her lost son why, with all his rock star vices, he never took up smoking. “Because you never stopped being a child,” she says. “It’s only the children who don’t have the desire to smoke.” And of course, by the end of the film, Cheyenne has his first cigarette. Because he grew up, see. On his journey. That was both literal and metaphorical – the kind you usually do some growing up on.
The entire film seems to exist for the visual gag of seeing an aging Goth in ridiculous situations: at the mall, playing handball, driving a pick-up, sitting shiva among Orthodox Jews; all while providing a vehicle for the filmmakers to contemplate what it means to grow up… and old. A theme lost, incidentally, on the under-40 crowd. I asked two 20-somethings after the screening what they thought of the film. “We didn’t really know what it was about,” the first girl informs me. “I do,” the second girl pipes up. “I know what it was about. [long pause] I think.”