Film Review: Cryus

The eponymous hero of Cyrus is self-indulgent, idle, needy, jealous, deceitful, spiteful, passive-aggressive, female-dependent and pretty much useless. Recognise him? Why yes, this 21-year-old, jobless, stay-at-home mummy's boy is a typical big-screen modern male. Fortunately, he comes up against a grizzled oldster who's been around the block. Surely this chap will teach the Oedipal wimp what it means to be a man.

So you might expect, but his supposedly grown up sparring partner turns out to be almost as much of a booby. John's spent the last seven years trying to get over his divorce. He has no friends or projects, and expects his ex to tell him what to do with his life. He's hopeless at chatting up women, and when Cyrus's mum shows interest in him, he's understandably amazed. "But I'm like Shrek," he exclaims.

He has indeed something in common with Shrek. In films these days, mature men are often bemused, toothless ogres. If they're lucky, they may be a little bit cute as well, and get played by Bill Murray or Hugh Grant. Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gene Kelly or Humphrey Bogart, on the other hand, would be pushed to find work in our own era.

Today's callower males tend to be portrayed as self-absorbed underachievers, like Cyrus. Michael Cera seems to play most of them. A dose of his hangdog, would-be winsome passivity seems to be all they require.

Buddy-bonding

Young or old, few of cinema's current menfolk have much to offer in the way of intelligence, emotion or enterprise. Grossing out and making jokes are often as much as they can manage. On a good day they may go in for a bit of clumsy buddy-bonding, but they don't have much idea of what women are all about. Their continuing capacity to pull sassy, smart and gorgeous examples of the latter remains a cinematic mystery.

You might have thought that readers had seized control of Hollywood. Yet one of the few recent assertions of traditional masculine values, The Hurt Locker, was directed by a woman. Most of our man-deriding films are made by men. Cyrus is written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass.

Mark has of course played a front-of-camera role in such celebrations of the dignity of manhood as Humpday and Greenberg.

So what's actually going on? An ugly truth perhaps presents itself. Maybe modern men really are much as they're depicted in films like The Ugly Truth. There are plenty of signs that the modern male has lost his way. A feminised world has stripped him of his dominance at home, in education and in the workplace. It has little use for his physical strength, and demands emotional skills he doesn't possess. He hasn't worked out what to do about this. Hence his self-doubt, fecklessness and confusion.

It isn't only Cyrus who's decided to deal with his problems by ducking out of what seems an unwelcoming world. Nowadays, one in four men in their late '20s still lives with his parents. That's twice as many as the number of women. And perhaps it's in the home that the root of the problem lies.

As fathers have retreated from parenting, often, as in Cyrus's case, in body as well as soul, boys have become the playthings of smother-mothers. "I feel I've done you a disservice in the way I've raised you," says Cyrus's mum to her son, ruefully but belatedly. To John she explains: "He's not really come into himself just yet." Nor have the rest of his gender. Perhaps in this case, we can't blame cinema for holding up a mirror to nature.