Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s first English language feature, This Must Be the Place, is the sort of film that’s too unique to easily sum up. It’s a fairly simple quest story that moves in a straight line without taking any turns, but the end goal is so strange, and the character taking the quest so off the wall, that saying it’s a quest movie doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s also the sort of character study that focuses its attention intently on establishing a character in stasis, putting him through a period of crisis, and then having him come out the other end a slightly more developed, if not completely changed person. But that makes this thing sound like way more of a stuffy Sundance drama than it really is. And though This Must Be the Place is quirky and unique, and manages to be funny all the way through, it’s not your typical indie comedy either. This is a movie about a middle-aged married person, not one of those stories about conflicted youth where everyone is just acting weird for lack of anything better to do.
The basic story is that Sean Penn is playing a reclusive former rock star named Cheyenne. He was the dyed hair, lipstick wearing, sensitive type of rock star who made music that appealed to the pale kids. Think The Cure or The Smiths. Life was decent enough for Cheyenne, or at least decent enough considering his pathological social anxieties and state of arrested development. Despite still dressing like he did back when he was in his twenties and famous, he’s got a nice house with stylish architectural flourishes in Dublin, he’s in a very healthy marriage to a rough-and-tumble fire woman played by Frances McDormand, and he even has a mentor relationship with a teenage girl. His life is stable. All of that changes once the father he’s been estranged from for thirty years dies though.
Suddenly, old emotions bubble to the surface, and, more than that, Cheyenne finds himself faced with a task. You see, his father was a holocaust survivor, and it turns out he had dedicated the last few decades of his life to tracking down a concentration camp guard who was the source of a humiliation for him; a former Nazi who has been living out his adult life in the United States. Cheyenne’s father got close enough to locate the man’s current wife, but now that he has passed, the job of finding this man and deciding what to do with him lies with his makeup wearing, sciatica suffering son. Road trip!
So, what’s good here? Primarily, this works as a great showcase for Penn’s acting abilities, and it sees him playing a different sort of character than we’ve ever seen from him before—which pretty much proves that the man can do anything. Middle-aged men dressed in goth garb basically can’t do anything without looking completely ridiculous, and while this film uses that truth for humor, you might be surprised by how well Penn is able to take a character who looks so ridiculous on first glance and still completely ground him. Cheyenne’s outer appearance isn’t just here for quirk either, it reveals important things about the character. This is a man who has never found his place in the world, who has always suffered from the feeling that there’s just something missing. Not only does Penn completely disappear into Cheyenne, but he’s also able to project a rawness and a vulnerability through him that is rare in movies, and is especially rare in celebrity actors with profiles as prominent as his.
And let’s bring that sciatica thing up one more time. It’s established through one throwaway line that Cheyenne has a bad back, but Penn never for a second lets you forget that this is a character in constant pain. His depiction of a person suffering from sciatica is naturally integrated into his performance and completely authentic. At every moment he has you wincing, but never does he point an arrow at what he’s doing or make the pain feel like it’s a performance. And that goes both for the bad back stuff and the complicated emotional stuff too. He’s just great here, and fans of his should not let the weirdness of this project keep them from checking out one of his best performances.
The other big asset this movie brings to the table is its script. Not only is This Must Be the Place just endlessly clever and full of snicker worthy one-liners, but it also brings the truth in a way that few movies do. Sorrentino’s script gives its characters broad, cartoon characterizations, but it still pulls legitimate emotional responses from their plights in a way that that only a handful of filmmakers—say, the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson—would be able to pull off while dealing with such silliness. Frances McDormand is just great, so you’re pretty much going to enjoy whatever she does, but the ridiculous relationship that her character has with Penn’s disparate character here should feel like a complete farce, and somehow it doesn’t. Some of that can be credited to how naturally McDormand can play even the strangest of situations, but a lot of it has to be credited to just how well Sorrentino creates a handful of characters and not only makes them feel unique, but also develops them fully enough that you can understand how they would fit together in real life.
All that said, This Must Be the Place isn’t the perfect filmgoing experience. It’s very deliberate in its pace, and while that can be a good thing here and there, when you’re following the travels of a character who is as passive as Penn’s reclusive Cheyenne, that can make for something of a slog just as often. This is, essentially, a story about a Nazi hunter, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the film. Nothing Cheyenne ever does has the slightest hint of urgency to it, and though he is the one who is actively taking this journey, it still often feels like the events of the film are simply happening to him while he sits idly by. Or, at worst, it feels like we’re watching some weird old goth guy do some lonely sightseeing in the American Southwest. Watching a made up Sean Penn sitting in bars while quietly sipping from an orange soda can be an amusing visual, but there are also a few places in the second act where it feels like Sorrentino’s script should stop bathing in its quirks and worry more about actively moving along with its story. All in all though, Sorrentino and his cast have made one fun, affecting film.
