Review No.42: This Must be the Place

To me Sean Penn always seems to be the master of Oscar campaigning with his two Oscar performances, in Mystic River and Milk, not really doing much for me when put up against his great turn in Dead Man Walking. Similarly when watching This Must be The Place I sat there wondering why he didn't try harder to get an Oscar nod for this film in which he plays a fading rock star who journeys back to America to track down the Nazi war criminal who tortured and embarrassed his late father during the war. The closest comparison to Penn's Cheyenne is The Cure's Robert Smith as he is still a man who has the crazy hair and wears the make-up that he did when he was much younger and fronted a band. As we learn throughout the film Cheyenne played with both Mick Jagger and David Byrne, the latter of whom appears in a cameo, but has since retired to Ireland with his wife Frances McDormand and now has a teenage nonchalant acolyte in Mary who follows him everywhere. He goes to America to see his dying father but arrives too late and instead gets there just in time for the funeral where he discovers the humiliation his Jewish father went through at the concentration camps. Learning that his tormentor is still alive and living happily in the states Cheyenne decides to travel across the country to track him down with the help of kindly locals and Judd Hirsch's Mordecai Miller a Jew who has spent his life tracking down former Nazis.

For the first 30 minutes of This Must Be the Place I have to admit to being a bit bored as we were treated to aspects of Cheyenne's life but after finishing the film I suppose that must've been the point. We see him try to find Mary a sensible boyfriend, visit the grave of a young fan who committed suicide after listening to his music and plays ping pong with his wife. However once the road movie element kicks in I found myself enjoying it more as we saw smalltown America through the eyes of a non-American in this case Il Divo director Paolo Sorrentino. The central premise is essentially that Cheyenne is different from everybody else so sticks out like a sore thumb when in the bars and diners that he visits. Of course there are those that recognise him and in a sweet scene he agrees to sing along to Talking Heads' This Must Be The Place with a small boy who plays a guitar. One of the problems I had with the film though is that Penn didn't ever want to make me believe that Cheyenne was a real character and put on a voice that sounded like Truman Capote. I honestly felt that it would've been a lot more affective if Penn had made the voice closer to his as while a lot of these New Romantic and Goth singers still put on all the clothes they don't accompany it with a silly voice. McDormand and Hirsch are both perfectly fine in their supporting roles though I didn't much care for the David Byrne mini-concert which was implanted during the middle of the film. With the combination of silly voice, cross-dressing and Nazi hunting I would've thought that Penn would be a dead cert for an Oscar nomination here but maybe the Academy, like me, thought that character really didn't have any basis in reality whatever.

Overall: A well-made American road trip film with a good script is ruined by Sean Penn's insistence to do a silly Capote voice therefore I'll have to give this 6/10