A Season in Hell: Debra Granik’s “Winter’s Bone”

Winter's Bone presents a paradox of family. Set in a dreary landscape where everyone is seemingly related – though one hesitates to actually use the word inbred – this is a story where characters are nevertheless separated from familial warmth. In fact, as the protagonist Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) goes searching for a missing father that who must be found before an important court date, declarations of "kin" are responded with obtuse hostility. Winter's Bone is almost anthropological as a mystery thriller of the Ozarks' desolate deep woods, where director Debra Granik focuses on a particular culture's dysfunctions, which are bred out of economic turmoil, and work to create memories as maladjusted as the families. Here, poverty stretched over a barren wasteland of ramshackle houses and depressed acres has become ripe for the basest self-interest in a rustic hell, sweeping away the buds of compassion, understanding, or altruism.

The opening of the film shows glimmers of what appears to be an idyllic world of family, with two young children playing in a large backyard, jumping on a trampoline and caressing animals. The kind of carefree bliss of children at play, where we can equate the embrace of an animal with the abstract nature of basic compassion, is soon tempered by the reality of this particular household, as bleak as the woods surrounding it. Nature is given room to grow here, but not nurtured enough to become healthy. There are three children in this house – the two youngsters we've seen playing, 12-year-old Sonny and 6-year-old Ashley, and then the older sister, Ree, who has become the surrogate maternal caretaker. The father is absent, and the mother is mute, as mental illness has apparently silenced her permanently. The procurement of food, barely enough for the four people living in the house, seems like it would scarcely provide a fraction of the necessary nutrition for growing bodies. At least there is a roof over their heads.

Or so it would be hoped. The sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) unexpectedly arrives at Ree's house, piquing the interest of neighbors who are a little too curious. The sheriff informs Ree that her father Jessup is missing, and so the family is in danger of losing the house. Jessup has a court date to face some drug-related charges, probably having to do with meth production. He put up the family's property as bond. If Jessup does not show up in court, Ree's family loses their home.

This is a wonderful set-up for a different kind of thriller. The protagonist has a race against time where she must find her criminally irresponsible and negligent father in order to keep her family stabilized and safe. The tricky part of this quest narrative that perhaps turns the archetypal "Search for the Father" on its head is that the mythical obstacles, the cyclopses and minotaurs so to speak, acting as subterfuges and barriers to knowledge, are Jessup's – and so Ree's – own family and neighbors residing in the landscape. If they are unwilling to help Ree find her father, then they must care more about him than the fact that his elusiveness will make a family homeless; but they are not protecting Jessup from the law, it becomes evident, but rather they are protecting themselves from any further intrusions from the law. Granik sets up motifs of altruism versus selfishness, where compassion should be natural but is stomped out by hunger. "Never ask for what ought to be offered," Ree tells her young siblings who stare hungrily at a pig being butchered for food by their neighbors. "Ought" is a strange word in this wasteland, so precious that it would be forgotten just to make life bearable. Ree's nurturing compassion is something she tries to pass along to the children, though we should wonder how she developed these traits in the first place.

There is a different morality at work in Winter's Bone, far removed from our familiar genteel liberal humanism of developed metropolises with easy access to books and cyberspace. This world is closer to the post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man) world of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, where ideas of “transcendent oneness with others and the universe” are crushed by desperation. Hunger, desperation, poverty, etc drive people to extreme measures and short-term solutions, from signing up for impractical credit loans to signing up for the military purely for money, as we see Ree do at her high school. These acts only keep people deeper in the mud.

Ree's opposite and foil is her uncle, Jessup's brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), a hard-looking fearsome man who tells her to stop asking questions. Teardrop silences the small kitchen where Ree explains her predicament to her aunt. He conveys a chilliness and knife-sharp malignancy that projects fearsomeness the same way a snake does before it strikes. Jessup is Teardrop's brother, so he can't let him be found, thus all questions must be quelled. End of story. The worries of the women, and of Ree's home, are of considerable less consequence.

This drives to the heart of the culture's sickness, manifested in sexual mores. The fraternal relationships are important, but the larger familial – and feminine ones – are not. There is a conspicuous wedge here between the world of the men – hard drinking and violent brutes – and the women. Men and women are separate in this world, with men controlling business and property while women subserviently whisper in the corners, if they dare to whisper at all. Early on, Ree tries to borrow a car from a school friend of her hers, who has dropped out after having a baby with her boyfriend. The boyfriend won't allow anyone to borrow the car, not even his girlfriend. He has no reason. He needs no reason. It's his property, just as the house is his property, just as the girlfriend – along with the baby – is his property. He is even defensive about allowing Ree to enter the house, for no reason other than she is an outside force interfering with his assortment of properties.

The way the grown men behave in Winter's Bone makes me think of the young boys in the film, whether it's the baby of Ree's friend, or Ree's brother Sonny. A neighbor man, affiliated with Jessup and Jessup's shady dealings (and thus fully assimilated into the norms of this culture) offers to take the boy off Ree's hands. At first it seems a helpful gesture, but it becomes apparent that it is actually a twisted maneuver to initiate the child into the masculine culture. When Sonny tries to protect his older sister from the hostile advances of the neighbor – who is angered by Ree's continuing pursuit for Jessup – the neighbor viciously threatens that he will teach Sonny how to “grow balls,” that is to say, "balls" do not necessarily refer to courage in this culture, as it does in our own, but rather "balls" refer to the masculine norms of unwomanly coldness, and a rejection of compassion (and thus a rejection of how we saw the boy playing during the opening moments of the film). Ree rejects this reactionary worldview, as surely the audience does, but that does not necessarily split the masculine and feminine into a binary where one is evil and the other good (i.e. – The Balls vs. The Heart). For Ree, there is balance, and she wants to teach both of her siblings to cook just as she wants to teach them how to hunt and skin animals for survival. But the unchecked brutality of the masculine power structure in the culture, so estranged from compassionate temperance and nurture, necessarily has crushed any kind of sexual harmony. Men like Teardrop are not allowed to feel (which makes his name ironic), while women like Ree's mother are silent. If there is any sexual harmony at all, it is seen in the consciousness of the music, a ritual act expressing a geographical heritage, a collective memory, a link to the past which thus associates with the concept of genealogy.

The "Alpha Male" chief of this backwoods culture is the patriarch identified as Thump, a burly, mostly hidden old man who is presumably the architect of most of the meth-producing operations that provide the area's nefarious backbone, giving the struggling families on the countryside enough to live on both economically and chemically. Ree is warned not to talk to Thump, and despite a blood relation, she must obey and walk away. Less of a man than a force, Thump becomes kind of an omniscient and ineluctable abstraction for masculine norms. If Jessup has disappeared for good or is, as it increasingly seems to be, dead, Thump would know. Ree becomes keen to this prospect as does the audience, and Winter's Bone adopts a familiar trope of the organized crime drama, where it seems Jessup was killed to keep things secret. But Ree continues to refuse obeying the directives of her culture, because of basic human necessity (keeping her home). She is punished. But we should notice that it's not the men who attack and beat her to a pulp. Rather, it's the women, surrounding her like a white-trash coven. Ree's corporeal punishment cannot even be physically linked back to the men, who only look on.

We learn a possible motivation for this. Teardrop appears, and seeing his bruised and battered niece he is told by the women that they beat her, not the men. The women are so subjugated here, and so absorbed in this abjection, that if Teardrop were to seek any kind of retribution for his niece, it necessarily would be visited on the women, not the men. He replies, "She ain't my brother," meaning that her relationship to him as a female family member is of considerably less consequence than a masculine link. Teardrop is looking for answers, and is angry at this culture too, though for perhaps misdirected reasons. Teardrop's name begins to betray him, and we glimpse a kind of kinship struggling to glimmer through the social barriers in place between him and Ree. Their distance is accented in the angle of how they are photographed in his truck (rarely have two people in the same car looked so distant from each other), but he is suddenly vulnerable, a large contrast to the abusive man we first met.

Teardrop's plotted revenge against the masculine elders of the culture upsets the inherent hard-line norms and moves him closer to Ree's sense of family. Statues of domestic bliss decorate the barren environment like frozen specters of a proper family that perhaps "could have been." Both Ree and Teardrop think of Jessup and how this missing father and brother became who he was, whose actions resulted in the mental illness of his wife and whose desperation put his own house up for bond. Ree sees photographs of her father in happier days, perhaps decades removed from the present. That memory of Jessup is eradicated, just as Jessup is eradicated, "nowhere," dissolved into nothing. Memory, like family, is affected by culture, and edited accordingly. "You forget you know it," Ree is told regarding the fate of her father upon its discovery. The past is meaningless when grasped by the powerful hands of men like Thump. Jessup is not anywhere after all. The warmth of the man in the old photographs has been cooled by the socioeconomic demands of circumstance, the numbing qualities of available narcotics feeding off of those economics, and the reactionary culture already in place.

These resonances are owed to the bleak and blue atmosphere created by director Granik, but also owe much to the extraordinary work of her leads. Newcomer Lawrence plays Ree as a diamond in the rough, with longings and determinations that fiercely strive to persevere in a blank hell that cannot possibly allow such qualities in a woman. Hawkes, so impressionable in his small role as an informant in Miami Vice (2006), is a revelation of ambivalent terror and oddly confused and misdirected nobility as Teardrop. "You always scared me," Ree admits to him. "That's 'cause you're smart," he answers, and Hawkes' snakelike cool stare makes us believe every word.

There is resolution at the conclusion of Winter's Bone, but only a glimpse of something consoling. Though set in a backwoods world, the culture seen in the film is just as estranged from sentimental notions of family and nature as the most roboticized cyberscape in our industrialized world is. Compassion and human understanding are not absent, but like the truth, they are hidden, being that they are feared to upset the balance of a tightly controlled world of basic systems of power and gender.

Art's Revolt: "I Am Love"

At the conclusion of I Am Love, just as the end credits were beginning to shine on the screen, the old women sitting behind me were beginning to complain about the the story, as the linear narrative trajectories of the plot seemed to lead…well… where did it lead? What exactly happened? The son dies, Tilda Swinton tells her husband that she's been unfaithful and in love with the handsome cook, the women all start to cry, and then she runs out of the luscious Milan house…and… well, you have a musical crescendo, and then…hmmm. "Jeez…what was that?" one of the women asked her moviegoing friend. "I don't know. Strange movie. Is that an ending?" "I wish they'd show us what happened."

This is not necessarily a rare occurrence in Edina theatres, where old women flock to…well…"Old Women Pictures." I recall a similar thing at the end of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette in 2006, where Coppola cuts from Marie's face looking out beyond Versailles as her coach strode along towards a bleak future, to the empty bedroom of the opulent palace, shattered by the revolution at hand, but silent save for the new wave beats of The Cure’s “All Cats Are Gray” on the soundtrack while the credits began. "I wanted to see some heads get cut off," one of the women said. Her companions all agreed. Heads should have rolled. So it was with I Am Love. The director should have told us exactly what happens, or at least had the courtesy to kill everyone so that we can forget about the mystery. There's even a little teaser in the middle of the end credits, which excited my elder companions behind me. "Oh, here we go…" But the image, of two lovers in a cave, remained unresolved, vague, beautiful – non-explanatory. It just was. "Hmmm," they said together, and left the theater, shaking their beauty-shop heads.

I can't blame any general moviegoer, young or old, sophisticated or simple, for having such a reaction to a film like I Am Love. This kind of film is a rarity nowadays, not only in mainstream multiplexes, but also in specialty theaters, where the Miramax tropes of the 1990s only made mainstream film elements prettier and more ornate for the "arts and croissants with a cocktail" crowd. Audiences like to be told things and have everything explained, with mystery reduced to language and the concrete presence of words. But I Am Love's title is the answer to its befuddling riddle of resolution. Story is, we must remember, not necessarily plot, but may also be character, or in this film's case, as the title explains, emotion. The film itself is like a conscious being, addressing itself as Love, and its aspirations are to go beyond the bounds of narrative development – where we see a rich family undergo changes of business and sexual relationships – and into the realm of examining art's possibilities and what exactly art (movies, painting, photography, music, cooking) does for us. I Am Love is asking us to acknowledge its title, and with that acknowledgement, we ask why it is that we go to see films in the first place.

The film opens at a family patriarch's birthday party. This patriarch, the owner of a great firm, is going to retire and pass his legacy onto his son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), and grandson Edoardo (Flavio Parenti), knowing that the business will be safe in the hands of bloodline heirs who will keep the things family-owned and controlled as economics rapidly change at the turn of the new century. The delicateness with how the birthday ritual is handled by director Luca Guadagnino with a unique selection of camera angles and carefully calibrated camera movements injects the film with a kind of self-awareness, where we notice its expressiveness of Form as it moves, accompanied by the music of John Adams. The film is singing to us as its frames wheel along.

The opening ritual gives us a general introduction to the various family members, but it also serves a purpose of allusion that connects the film to other artistic touchstones. Many people will naturally think of The Godfather trilogy, which open with similar rituals, but the very name "Tancredi" will tip the viewer off that Guadignino is probably thinking of Luchino Visconti's 1963 masterpiece, The Leopard, about changing socioeconomics in the mid-19^th century, the character of Tancredi (played by Alain Delon in Visconti's film) being something of a two-faced charlatan, fighting for the revolution at one instant, while socially performing so he can simply stay at the top of the ladder the next. Visconti, while making the picture, was thinking about rituals and the processes of social change over time, perhaps influenced just as much by the world portrayed by Thomas Mann's 1900 novel Buddenbrooks as he was by the original novel The Leopard (Visconti loved Mann, coming to adapt Death in Venice in 1971, and planning a never-realized adaptation of The Magic Mountain). Buddenbrooks opens with a ritual very much like the one we see in I Am Love, where multiple generations come together one night, private dramas slowly play out underneath the theatricality of social presentation, and the family's business, which must be maintained, is threatened by an environment that is growing more global. In the 1830s-1840s of Buddenbrooks, the family firm of a mercantile business in Lubeck is compromised by the emerging European Union, while in I Am Love, a similar kind of business is possibly crumbling under the pressure of late-capitalist globalization.

At the heart of Mann, Visconti, and I Am Love (and Coppola for that matter) are the conflicts of the larger and more impersonal mechanics of society versus the individual yearnings within the living components making up that grand machine of family, politics, and business. The individual expresses himself or herself through passion, whether in sport – such as Eduardo, who has lost in a competition earlier on this day, which will lead him to focus more fully on being a good businessman – or more especially in the creative act of art. We note the daughter, Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), whom the grandfather believes wants to be a painter, but she finds herself better suited for photography, which kind of irks him. Perhaps she wants her art to get closer to reality than a painting can. This family, the Recchis, has a long history of what looks like art collection, as the grand Milan house is ornately decorated with many pieces that must have cost a lot of money to acquire. But that's another issue the film is addressing: the mere acquisition of Art, where it is a passive affair, a frivolity enjoyed by a couple of elderly moviegoers on a Saturday afternoon, versus something with a particular aura, an expression of self, a communicative act. Artists and Art Collectors are different, it appears, though that is not to say those of us who consume art are restricted from entering and partaking in its passion, suffering and sympathizing in its ecstasy.

This idea is shown in the film's affair storyline, where Tancredi's wife, Emma (Tilda Swinton) begins to understand that the poor cook, Eduardo's friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), is in love with her. His love is expressed in the care he takes in preparing, sculpting, his food – something not merely to be consumed the same way those old ladies wish to consume the movie, but something with which one is in dialogue, connecting. The love affair is illicit, and it is a plot conceit we have seen in a thousand other stories, surely, but the way Guadagnino handles it over the course of his picture, every moment, every caress, every hallucination of longing and guilt, photographed and edited with immaculate care and preternatural sensibility, makes not the incident the important element, but the emotion, the physical element underneath the skin and providing the gooseflesh. Antonio is a Creator, a Communicator; Tancredi is a Collector, a mere Consumer.

Emma finds this love entrancing because she too was one of Tancredi's collections. He was collecting art in Russia when he met her and decided to take her home and marry her. This is not to say that Tancredi can be simplified into a hollow rich man who takes his wife – and the art he collects – for granted. He is what his class has made him, and the larger generational forces compel him to act differently from his own father. After the patriarch has died, Tancredi is all too willing to sell the family business off to ensure lasting wealth and to enable the company to grow with the changing world. The business will expand beyond the local and into the global market, much to the chagrin of Eduardo, who appears to be something of an idealist. Each of these characters is trapped by circumstance, the larger surrounding forces making them react the way they do to change. Tancredi simply does not speak the language that Emma is finding in her relationship to Antonio and his food, or that Elisabetta is realizing in her photography (where she is expressing her secret lesbianism). We notice on the television, as Tancredi and Emma lie together watching in their bedroom, that she is entranced by what is on screen, while he is rather impersonal. The film on the television is Jonathan Demme's 1993 picture Philadelphia, and the scene being showcased is the moment when Tom Hanks' AIDS-afflicted character is ecstatically rhapsodizing about how opera affects him, connecting to every emotional facet of his life. Emma instantly understands this, as does the viewer caught in the spell of I Am Love (regardless of whether or not one is a fan of Demme's film). Tancredi, meanwhile, changes the channel.

As practicalities doom the family business to an impersonal global superstructure (where "capital is democracy," we are informed), the secrets of Emma are revealed through the unspoken art of Antonio's cooking – Eduardo learns her secret, feels betrayed, and in his angry passion has an accident that leads to a detrimental injury. The realities of death, looming over the dreamlike entrancement of escape, quash discussion and I Am Love recedes away from plot in the desperation of pure emotion: the what is not important, the why is not important, just the how, what we see and what we feel. This is the beatitude communicated in its ending where the film's content is relayed within its form, and the film seeks to become more than a plot, as all great films should, and ascends the heights of pure emotion.

This film is a testament to the great talent of Tilda Swinton, a candidate for one of our greatest living actresses. Androgynous and never a sex symbol (some disagree with me), she hurls herself into the nakedness of Emma without a second thought, never speaking a word of her native English in this Italian film (though she still plays an immigrant; she's from Russia, however, not the UK). Beginning in the avant garde films of Derek Jarman, and the sex-changing title role in Sally Potter's bizarre Orlando (1993), Swinton maneuvered herself into the mainstream as the dangerously determined women in films like The Deep End and Julia, the "cold bitch" in Burn After Reading, the icy yet vulnerable woman who has a love affair with Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and the fleshy corporate pawn in Michael Clayton, for which she deservedly won an Academy Award. Swinton is the kind of actress that I don't believe will age, because of her ability to grapple any kind of role, whether young or aged, villainous or noble, cold or passionate. I Am Love is a film that she helped Guadagnino develop (she is credited as a producer), and it may be her most unique triumph to date.

Needy Men: “Cyrus”

This past weekend, hundreds of thousands of teenage girls clamored together in hopes of seeing the newest installment of the Twilight saga, Eclipse, one more piece of that worn-hearted document detailing the torturous love triangle of beautiful Bella, werewolf Jacob, and vampire Edward. I confess that I have no plans to see it, not really out of straight-boy smugness so much as plain disinterest. I did see the first film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's 4-book series, and was impressed with director Catherine Hardwicke's handling of the smaller domestic moments of poor outsider Bella getting closer to her father, shot delicately with hand-held cameras in a lo-fi aesthetic. Unfortunately, the film gradually becomes another videogame/CGI spectacle filled with Zack Snyder-style slow-motion dedicated more to fashion than to character, losing me and debilitating any possible interest to re-enter this teen vampire world. But from what I gather, having seen that first film and reading so much about the sequels, this saga is basically a woman's fantasy of being trapped between two handsome, but ultimately needy, young men. These guys seem as tremendously well-intentioned as they are whiny, in a steady competition of emotion as they duke it out, vampire versus werewolf, for the grand prize of the loving consoling warmth of the feminine passage from whence they came. This is the rather off-putting secret behind every needy-guy romance story, usually not realized by the author creating them. When you strip it down, it's the narrative of a man seeking approval from Mommy. Such a reductionist perspective turns a lot of people off, which is why the repression of civilization is so important. But for as much negativity generated by Freud in our post-feminist academic circles, I can't help but perceive blatant – if unsavory – truth in it.

It's welcoming then that Mark and Jay Duplass should also be releasing, in a far more limited manner, their own love story of needy men, as the mother's affections are the top prize in a duel of infantile male wills. Cyrus is the Needy Man saga audiences should probably check out this week, as it deconstructs our romances for what they are, its handheld zoom-in visual style setting an ironic counterpoint that distances it from most other Man Boy comedies. It's an incredibly funny film, even cynical, but it retains moving warmth throughout, without once ever becoming kitsch or breaking its spell of biting humor. It also has two of the most affecting male performances of the year, both graduates of the Man Boy R-rated comedy world that's come to overbearing popularity in the last ten years thanks to Judd Apatow: John C. Reilly (who was in one of the better Apatow-produced comedies, Step Brothers) as the grown ne'er-do-well freelance loser looking for love, and Jonah Hill (Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Get Him to the Greek in the Apatow universe) as the full-grown spawn of Reilly's love interest, played with sexy verve by Marisa Tomei. What struck me about Cyrus was how it seemed to be moving beyond the bare frat-boy sensibilities of Apatow's loser-male world, and directing our attention to how the Apatow-styled protagonist may sweetly amount to an obsessed stalker – which is not so much a critique of the movies and how they may be taking for granted the aberrant behavior in males that the films portray, but rather a critique of a prudish culture that is so emasculated that it requires movies such as Apatow's for a much needed catharsis.

I bring up Twilight and Apatow because I think that they may be a part of the same beast, at least as products of popular consumption. In spite of their differences, both products emulate the nice-guy man-child who becomes needy. In Stephanie Meyers' world, they're just a bit more handsome, and the neediness is not played for that neediness. The empathy that we feel for the characters, whether the romantically Gothic dashing men of Twilight or the jestering doofuses of Apatow, poises a strange disconnect in the man-child world of Fiction and the happenstance of relationships in Real Life. Of course, whether dashing or dorky, the assertive males in romances both Gothic and comic amount to something a little creepy when the prism of fiction is removed. Since the 1990s, perhaps no film has been as damaging to young men than Cameron Crowe's otherwise perfect Say Anything, which communicated the transcendent romantic truth to millions of budding teenagers in love that the woman who just dumped you would be receptive to having you play Peter Gabriel outside her window, waking her up at dawn. Or for that matter, throwing away "logic" while following your genius prodigy girlfriend to London, simultaneously placating her by censoring your sense of humor the instant she is offended ("That's ageism," Diane Court tells Lloyd Dobler as he makes an observation about the elderly; Dobler immediately agrees to change his ways. The courtship resumes). Doblerism is good for the manufacturing of well-educated and handsome needy dudes who would probably benefit, in terms of romantic success, if only they would avert their eyes from Cameron Crowe and instead become acquainted with Cary Grant and Clark Gable, both of whom have personas that are unfortunately far less ecumenical in the post-feminist world.

I'm not complaining about the problems of representation in Film, or the question as to whether men are emasculated in contemporary Culture. That's not my concern. What does interest me is this question as to whether the films, like the people watching them, are kind of fooling themselves. Like a good friend blinded by infatuation, I would sort of like to see them reflecting on their scenarios with a bit more dark honesty, and maybe have the courage to laugh a little more at themselves. Of course, Apatow's films do laugh at themselves, up to a point. Their beginnings and endings however still are a little candy-coated, a lovely delusion to make the pill a pleasant catharsis for the manboys ingesting them.

Cyrus makes its Freudian thoughts on the Manboy Generation overt, the morbid element of two manboys fighting over Mommy not at all veiled by rib-nudges or zesty in-jokes. John (Reilly) is simply lonely guy whose best friend is his ex-wife (Catherine Keener), from whom he's been divorced seven years. A failure with women, prone to drinking too much in order to approach anyone, he's caught off-guard by a beautiful and eccentric female he recognizes as being much too attractive for him, Molly (Marisa Tomei). "I'm Shrek," he says to her. "What are you doing in the forest with Shrek?" His stupid impulses lure him away from this unexpected flirtation so that he can sing and dance to "the best song ever," The Human League's "Don't You Want Me?" This becomes a scene of pronounced embarrassment, seen in so many other like-minded comedies. But the moment changes on a dime as the crowd, at first so embarrassed for John, is suddenly responsive the moment when Molly "saves" him by taking up the female vocals for the song, dancing with him. The two of them end up sleeping together and making plans for the next night.

We instantly recognize that John is too desperate, too happy, and I was a little afraid for him at this point (few actors can play pathetic as well as John C. Reilly). The film crosses a very dark line when it makes no bones about the apparent creepiness of John as he stalks Molly back to her house, to find out why she keeps on leaving him early. Why won't she spend the night? The answer, John finds out the next morning, is embodied in the plump figure of Cyrus (Hill), her 22-year-old son whom she lives with and dotes on.

At this point the film could become a few things. It could be a generic Freudian war between incoming Stepfather and Needy Son, or a cuddly male bonding film. But I appreciated how, though the Duplasses show how all of these characters in this bizarre love triangle are flawed, Hill's Cyrus is given the kind of freakiness of almost Norman Bates-caliber awkwardness that Jonah Hill's appearance deserves (not to be harsh on Hill's looks, but even in Superbad he looks like he would be perfect as a serial killer). Just as John is an omega male of Generation X, emasculated and needing feminine warmth to stave off loneliness and his pathetic disposition, Cyrus is something of a monster created by too much mommy-love, adored and adoring to a fault, manipulating and pulling strings to maneuver control of Molly to the point that she still keeps her bedroom door open at night.

The kind of passive-aggressive combat between Cyrus and John is not the chuckle-yuk-chuckle nudge-nudge comedy of Apatow's work (which I should point out that I often enjoy very much), but is distanced by the Duplass' aesthetic approach of documentary-style cinematography, which creates a distance between the characters and the audience, and thereby prevents the safe comedy of rib-nudging. But it also gives Cyrus a more genuinely funny demeanor as its often-improvised story undulates, and we notice that the plague of masculine neediness is not only restricted to the two principal leads, but also to the fiancé of John's ex (who grows needy for Mommy attention when John hovers around). The anger generated by these men who want their mommies puts the Manboy comedy in the Freudian territory where it belongs, a place where an audience can observe itself acting stupid and foolish, and can be motivated to do more than passively laugh along.

The transparency of Freudian dynamics in Cyrus is the kind of thing that a lot of women might find nightmarish; after all, Freud is despised in academia currently as a hogwash misogynist who did more harm than good. Nevertheless, whatever refutations we can make about him, I still have a hard time denying that a lot of the time when it comes down to love and sex for men, it strangely comes all back to Mommy (Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks short from New York Stories is another interesting example of this uncomfortable realization). The endings of most Manboy comedies are jovial and goofy escapes, where the characters conquer their fears or passions or insecurities. The blink of whimsy at the conclusion of Cyrus, where the warmth of the welcoming mother draws the pouting son/lover back inside, is funnier and more fulfilling perhaps because it is so much more unnerving and frank, something needed in a pop culture over-saturated with Needy Men that is only creating more Needy Men.