This Must Be The Place is one of those cases where the central performance overshadows the film itself. Sometimes that’s a good thing, as is the case here, because it allows the performance to carry the film through its rockier moments. But it often means, as is also the case here, that if you look past the performance the cracks begin to show.
Sean Penn plays Cheyenne, an eccentric ex-rockstar who lives, seemingly off of the royalties from his days in the spotlight, with his wife Jane (Frances McDormand) in a large mansion in Ireland. When he finds out his father is dying, he sets out to track down a Nazi that persecuted him during his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz.
Like I said the film is all about the performance and Penn more than steps up to the plate to carry it on his shoulders. He allows to truly get invested in this off-beat character in a way that’s intimate and natural, pulling back to the curtain, so to speak, on someone who others walking by would judge, as happens in one scene when he visits the supermarket and gets laughed at by some fellow shoppers.
The performance is, admittedly, very showy in nature but Penn commits to it 100%, never wavering and always doing his utmost to make us forget it’s him we’re watching. His effeminate voice, comical nervous laugh, make-up and wild hair (his appearance is spookily close to Robert Smith from The Cure) serves both to establish this daring character as “alien” to the world around him and also to make Penn barely recognisable.
The issus with the film, therefore, lie beyond Penn. Indeed his bold persona allows you to forgive some of the other flaws, but some of them are too prominent to ignore. There is an inherent lack of focus that while putting across that feeling of not really knowing what your place is in the world, which is at the heart of the movie, nonetheless lends it a rather frustrating aimlessness. Director and co-writer Paulo Sorrentino awkwardly shifts tone far too much to the point where some of the dramatic scenes lose their effect because of a comic scene before or after it, and vice-versa.
There’s somehow both an importance and an “ah whatever” approach to Cheyenne’s quest to find his father’s persecutor, never really making it clear whether that’s something we’re opposed to get invested in or if it’s just a side-note on Cheyenne’s journey of self-discovery. Perhaps it’s both but that’s not made clear enough in the film itself.
Suffering from a lack of focus and perhaps getting lost in trying to tell a few too many different aspects of a story at once, This Must Be The Place doesn’t completely work as the emotional character journey it clearly wants to be. However, the film has a terrific central performance by Penn (he is reason enough alone to see it), as well as supporting players like Frances McDormand and Kerry Condon. It’s filled with charming little moments, thoughtful life observations and, in general, is intriguingly off-kilter. A curious diversion with its heart firmly in the right place even if its head isn’t.
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This Must Be The Place is out in UK cinemas on April 6.
The fact that it is “off kilter” is exactly what I loved about it. One minute smiling and laughing, the next I was back in serious mode. Wonderful performances by all concerned but in particular Penn. It also looked stunning too. Can’t wait to watch it again.