This must be the Place

Probably the only mainstream movie in the last 15 years to use cigarette smoking as an emblem for both regained mental health and a happy ending, Paolo Sorrentino’s “This must be the Place” is bizarre on all levels. This 2011 picture is also an artifact of stupefying visual beauty, intermittently emotionally powerful and an oddity that amazes on account of its graphic ingenuity, weird performances, and mock-heroic themes. Sean Penn plays an aging heavy metal Goth-rock star, retired to a castle in Dublin. Penn’s outlandish appearance is one of the reasons that this film was a commercial failure in the United States -- audiences took one look at the trailer and fled from the film; I know this was my reaction when I saw the movie advertised as a “Coming Attraction.” Penn has startlingly blue eyes that are intensely sad highlighting a drooping face painted stark, clownish white. Penn wears eye-shadow and red lipstick and he has a fright-wig of scraggly black hair in a huge dark nimbus around the expressionless Kabuki-mask of his features. Penn’s character staggers around walking with a pigeon-toed arthritic gait like an elderly woman and he drags behind him a suitcase on wheels. Dressed in funereal black, Cheyenne (the name of the character) looks exactly like Shock Peter (Struwelpeter), the unfortunate hero of a series of macabre and sadistic German children’s tales -- the character is always being frozen or hacked into pieces or devoured by wild animals or stung into a bloated mass of tumors by bees. (In one scene in the film, Cheyenne stands rigid in the corner of a modern kitchen tormented by a huge goose -- a pictorial image that seems derived directly from the Struwelpeter stories; he is like a more demented and outlandish version of Edward Scissorhands.) Cheyenne talks in an inaudible high-pitched whisper, articulating his words with the puzzling clarity of a long-time drug addict; at times, he acts like Ozzie Osborne in the reality TV show -- he is childish, friendly, and constantly bemused. It seems that two of his young fans killed themselves, allegedly inspired in their suicide by Cheyenne’s music and this has caused the rock star to retire to his castle and become a sort of recluse. Either he is extremely depressed, almost to the point of catatonia, or fantastically bored and, in one startling scene set in New York with David Byrne, he confesses that he is paralyzed with guilt over the death of the two fans -- for no good reason, the scene is visually astonishing, set in an abandoned opera house where Byrne seems to be playing some kind of 120 foot long mandolin strung from the balcony to the place’s ruinous stage. It turns out that Cheyenne’s father was an orthodox Jew who was tormented by a Nazi guard in Auschwitz. When the old man dies, Cheyenne decides to hunt down his father’s lifelong nemesis, a project that compels him to embark on an extended road-trip through the American hinterland. Sorrentino is Italian and his United States is full of dwarf sheriffs, tattooed fat ladies, Nietzsche-influenced gun nuts, and enormous, empty landscapes that are almost surrealistically lovely. Parts of the film resemble Werner Herzog’s road film, “Stroszek,” a gallery of misfits and grotesques poised against vast deserts, prairies and mountain ranges. On the sound-track, we hear Sara Palin speaking and Barack Obama and David Byrne’s kindergarten-singable “This must be the Place (Naïve Melody).” The hunt for the Nazi takes Cheyenne to Bad Axe, Michigan and, then, Alamagordo where the hero chastely courts a war-widow, the granddaughter of the ancient Auschwitz guard. (Cheyenne won’t sleep with the beautiful young widow because he is happily married to Jane, his wife in Dublin played by Frances McDormand in her most plain Fargo-style demotic, a character designed for the greatest possible contrast to the depressed, zombie-like Cheyenne -- Jane is also a firefighter.) The climactic scenes in America are very strange and, probably, represent some kind of fantasy -- they don’t make sense in the context of the rest of the film. A number of critics interpret the confrontation with the superannuated Nazi as taking place on salt flats -- but this is clearly wrong: the scene is shot on a kind of barren icy tundra in high mountains and the staging is dreamlike and overtly unrealistic. Cheyenne takes a picture of the old Nazi and, then, strips him naked and makes him walk naked through the snow and the old man’s mummy-like body and dried striated flesh against the fresh-fallen snow is one of the most shocking, obscene, and remarkable things that I have seen in recent films. Is the old man dead? Where does this confrontation occur? All of this is unclear as are, to be honest, a number of other plot elements -- for instance, there is nice-looking sixty-ish woman in Dublin who we see repeatedly and who encourages Cheyenne to smoke, since people “who remain children all their lives” never pick up that habit, a comment that motivates the final “happy ending” involving Cheyenne and the fag. The woman is an important presence in the film but I have no idea who she is or what she represents. Similarly, a young woman who hangs out with Cheyenne in a Dublin coffee-shop near a huge glass building made of elliptical crystal shells seems to be Cheyenne’s daughter. But we learn that he has no children and that she is merely a fan in whom the aging rock star has taken an avuncular interest. A big dog rambles around Cheyenne’s Irish estate, its head encased in a collar like an inverted lampshade. Someone asks Cheyenne why the dog wears the contraption around its throat. “I don’t know,” Cheyenne says. “Jane takes care of the dog.” And this is indicative of any number of strange images in the film that amaze and confound, and that really aren’t ever explained. The film is not a success -- it is too willfully peculiar and too ambiguous. Many of the film’s puzzles seem to be the result of indecision on the part of the director and his screenwriter, vagueness in the conception or, even, confusion. Yet, I guarantee that you will never see anything else like this movie. The combination of elements -- Glam rock, Ozzie Osborne style befuddlement, John Ford landscapes, and Nazis -- simply should not work; the fascinating thing is that it almost does.