The Vault #58: Scarface

The immediate effect of sound being introduced into movies was the revolution of genre filmmaking. Epic adventures and romances, once visual feasts, were foregone for talky screwball comedy, musicals and rattling shoot-em-ups, both in the form of westerns and gangster pictures. Yet, a quarter of a century later, as Hollywood entered its golden age, the didacticism of Public Enemy and White Heat had all but vanished, replaced by the cool nihilism of film noir, and the urban melodramas favored by the likes of Paddy Chayefsky and Bud Schulberg. The gangster picture, its tropes, technical trademarks and rattling gunplay had disappeared, only to be found later in post-Hitchcock action movies and neo-noir. The movie that bridges the gap from morality play to white-knuckle thrill-ride is Scarface, a masterpiece of economy from Howard Hawks.

After an opening plea to the audience to encourage the government to crack down on organized crime, Hawks lays out the entire world of Scarface and its protagonist, Tony Cromante, in a single shot. The camera starts outside a nightclub, where a blue-collar worker and his son are cleaning the streets; pushing inside, we find a mob boss in the remains of a wild party long ended. He discusses some trivial matters with his lieutenants, then bids them goodnight. Alone, he wanders towards a pay-phone, where a gunman, seen only in silhouette, enters and shoots him down. From the drab, depression-era exterior to the lavish club bedecked in finery, to the shadowy murder scene, we've gotten everything we need to know about Al Capone's Chicago, or at least this rendering of it.

This in-the-moment quality fits perfectly with Cromante, a sociopathic thug who steal, murders and cavorts his way to the top of the underworld without even a whiff of premeditation. Played by Paul Muni with the grace and tact of a wounded animal, Cromante is a little kid killing bugs with a magnifying glass, cackling when he discovers his first Thompson sub-machine gun. When he sees a woman, he pursue her; when face with an adversary, he wipes him out. First seen as a triggerman working for chump change, Cromante and his partner Little Boy (George Raft) rise to the top the way everyone else does in a free market economy - by being willing to do anything to get ahead. Unlike later movies about crime and criminals, there is no psychologizing or explanation - Cromante simply does, and others react. The audience is privy to this story on the basis of its entertainment, not the ostensible message about public responsibility.

Scarface is subversive in its sympathies, making Cromante's endless cycle of violence a sport of sorts, the pursuit by the police another wrinkle in the game. Al Capone was older, fatter, and more coldly calculating than his screen counterpart. Yet, there's no confusing his bloody rampage with the "American Dream", as in clumsy 1983 remake, which draped a hammy Al Pacino in designer suits and luxury automobiles, all inside a lavish tropical compound. There's very little enjoyment of wealth; Tony has to leave a fancy theatre early to take care of a few bad apples. At one point, he shows off his swank new apartment, whose main feature are steel shutters for the windows, a preventative measure for anyone who gets creative with a machine gun. This isn't the glitz power of Cagney and Edward G. Robinson - Tony is more gangster on the run, even in the confines of his own home, a shark that keeps devouring and swimming, never comfortable for an instant.

Tony Cromante is not a true-crime facsimile, or didactic cautionary tale - he's an action hero, a hell-bent type along the lines of Mad Max or John McClane. When his world does finally crumble, he doesn't cry like Robinson at the end of Little Caesar or evoke the pathos of Cagney in The Roaring 20s or Public Enemy. Muni only becomes more cagey, more ferocious, more excited to empty his clip. The fortress of his apartment was just a pretext - all the while he craved the showdown, the violent climax. There's no remorse, either for Tony or us, as he bleeds out in the gutter. We had our fun.

Winter's Bone

The nature of the film industry has relegated rural America to a symbolic representation of itself. Coastal elites retire to the back country only to make some larger political point about the country as a whole. Small-town poverty is far less compelling than urban decay, if only for its less compelling visual elements. While films like The Deer Hunter and Harlan County, PA made heroes of the heartland, they did so to score political points. White trash are never just allowed to be white trash - they are forced to stand for something more, and usually come off as cartoonish or pathetic. Debra Granik's Winter's Bone avoids these cliches, instead revealing a compelling narrative set in an undiscovered country. A double-winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Winter's Bone brings a regional familiarity and genuine soul that proves why small, smart independents remain indispensable to American film.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old girl saddled with caring for her two younger siblings and catatonic mother. When the Sheriff (Garrett Dillahunt) informs her that her dad Jessup has skipped out on his bond, the meager existence eked out by the Dollys is threatened. Her family and home hanging in the balance, Ree must find her father, dead or alive. She sets out on foot across a landscape last seen in John Hillcoat's adaptation of The Road; burned out cars dot decaying forests, while weeds over take derelict houses.

Ree journeys to see her kin, members of a back-woods organized crime family responsible for a whole lot of methamphetamine production. No one can tell her about Jessup because doing so would be a kind of snitching. Her uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) does Ree physical harm upon her first inquiry, so that she does not get into deeper trouble. A slightly older, more honorable villain than the rest of his family, Teardrop does not seem to care who killed his brother; the greater enemy is the law. We are used to movie gangsters having an implicit code of silence for a reason; they are protecting a vast, illicit fortune. In the decrepit Ozarks, wealth seems measured in the condition of one's pickup truck. The crime depicted in Winter's Bone is more about preserving one's individualism than it is about creating an empire. From shooting ranges to home-made drug labs, the Dollys are not interested in buying into the American Dream, but rather keeping away from it, and it away from them.

Earlier this year, Julian Nirtzberg's documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia caused quiet a controversy; it's depiction of the drug-addicted, sex-crazed, welfare-exploiting White family bordered on a mean-spirited minstrel show. The audience was encouraged through music cues and out-of-context interviews to laugh at the ignorance and self-destructiveness of Appalachian degenerates. Granik walks a much finer line; well aware of the chasm between her film's subject and audience, she holds characters close to the camera, with minimal dialogue, their humanity emanating from their facial expressions and depressing surroundings rather than forced caricature and incident. Anyone watching, from Arkansas to Paris, can see this is a film about a young girl, beset by obstacles, attempting to do the right thing.

Though set in a fallen world of thugs and drug-dealers, Winter's Bone avoids the all-too-familiar mechanics of crime and noir films, spending more time on the moral education Ree imparts her siblings than the finer points of the plot. The Dollys, lead by grandfather Big Milton, do have a complex criminal code (one of the principles being that men shall not beat women; only women shall), but neither this nor answering the mystery of Jessup's disappearance are Granik's chief concern. The focus is on Ree and those kids, whom she expertly shelters from the realities of the world.

Lawrence is the spiritual center of the film, but it is Hawkes who helps us understand the mentality of the hillbilly meth addict, and the peculiar blend of rebelliousness and honor that govern his world. At first terrifying, Hawkes eventually opens the character up, and we realize beyond the loose word family thrown around by the Dollys, at least some of them are not beyond true emotional connection. His hands shaking, bag of meth in hand, he evokes our sympathy as much as the so-called "innocent" protagonist. Ree may be the most virtuous Dolly deserving of rescue, but she was not the only one born into this - the important part is that the family stay close, no matter who or what that family is. Winter's Bone does not deliver our heroes from unhappiness, but it does keep them together, holding on for dear life.

The Vault #57: The Wrong Man

In the opening shot of The Wrong Man, Alfred Hitchcock steps into a glaring spotlight, casting a dramatic shadow across the screen. His face obscured, the master of suspense assures us that everything that follows is closely based on actual events, and that the resulting film is more twisted than even the most fantastic of his fictions. As we fade into the film proper, a block of text again reminds us that The Wrong Man is a true story. The point sufficiently underlined, Hitchcock starts us down a less-than-fully-realistic spiral of guilt and terror.

There is the veneer of truth, at least to begin with. Ever-earnest Henry Fonda plays Manny Balastrero, an Italian-America bass player who ekes out a meager living at Manhattan's swanky Stork Club, in order to care for his wife (Vera Miles) and two sons. The first fifteen minutes show a committed family man, navigating the chiaroscuro subways and all-night diners of New York City; the same settings as a fatalistic noir, but without a doomed sinner as our focal point. When asked if he ever drinks or dances at the club, Manny laughs; such excess is way above his income bracket. The setup is decidedly quiet for a this period of Hitchcock; Fonda is much softer, kinder than the voyeuristic playboys portrayed by Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. This gentility makes him weak when conflict arises, in the form of false accusations that Balastrero is a robber who has been terrorizing his Queens neighborhood for months.

In the long tradition of paranoid prisoners stretching from The Trial to Shutter Island, Manny soon finds himself in a cell for reasons he can hardly comprehend. He's going on trial for crimes we can hardly believe he's committed, and the debt piling up puts him and his family in an even more dire position. The Wrong Man has just as much stylization as it needs, which is to say not a great deal; we're wrapt up enough in whether we believe Manny at his word. As convincing as Fonda is as an innocent man, in a film from the master of suspense, we always expect the other shoe to drop. In the meantime, as the domesticity crumbles around her, Miles is overcome with more paranoia than her husband. Guilt is a character in The Wrong Man as much as fear is in Vertigo. 


All as a result of a string of robberies we never see, Hitchcock gets tremendous mileage out of a dialogue-heavy courtroom drama. Whether Manny is guilty or not, much of the second half of the film focuses on the consequences of that possibility. Miles sanity begins to slip; Manny prepares to say goodbye to his children. The seed of all this torment is so frustratingly simple - Hitchcock conveys beautifully the ability of our lives to change in an instant. Suspicion, we learn, is a powerful force. No Cold War message lies open for easy interpretation; any implication that the audience has something to hide along with Manny is outside the film's purview. However, as with Shutter Island, if you experience feelings of guilt, you may have some monsters, somewhere, even if not the ones you find yourself on trial for.

The core of the film is Miles, upon whom the accusations take their greatest toll. Loyal housewife turned ranting Lady MacBeth, her eventual committal to an asylum marks the greatest damage done by the charges leveled against Balastrero. The loving wife and mother is one of the iconic images of the 1950s, if not many of Hitchcock's films of the period. Here, finally focusing on a relatively stable domestic situation, the directors finds much dysfunction. Though an epilogue assures us she eventually regained her wits, the final acted moments we get from Miles give us no such comfort.

These blocks of text, which bracket The Wrong Man like explanatory paragraphs in a police report, do well to sanitize the film, much like the psychiatrist's monologue at the end of Psycho. Like that film, however, Hitch's rationalization and recuperation feels forced, shoving disturbing aspects of the American psyche under the rug, if only just slightly. The Wrong Man reveals something dark and sinister, then wishes it away with some happy music and some end titles. We cannot do the same.

Total Destruction to Your Mind

Let us first dispense with the obvious. Movies are lies (at 24 frames per second). Movies are magic. Magic is illusion. Dreams are illusions. Illusions are lies. Movies are dreams. Inception is movie about creating dreams. And dreams within dreams. All these come under the umbrella dream that is the seventh film from director Christopher Nolan.

The premise: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) are hired by business tycoon Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea deep in the subconscious of Saito's rival Fischer (Cillian Murphy). In order to do this, Cobb and his team must construct levels of reality to be accessed as dreams within dreams, the deepest of which will reveal Fischer's weakness and allow Cobb to manipulate his target. Unfortunately, Cobb has some demons in his own subconscious, and the deeper he wades into the dream world, the more they manifest themselves, and in dangerous ways. At the heart of Inception is the nature of reality. Period.

Two hundred million dollars might seem a pittance to get to the heart of this question, but Nolan has plumbed these depths at a fortieth of the cost. Like Memento, Inception is the story of a man coping with the death of his wife, and hiding in constructed worlds to avoid admitting she is gone. Sure, each level of reality has a lot more polish than Leonard Shelby's stolen Jaguar and twice-booked motel rooms, but essentially, both films are about self-made labyrinths. Cobb's however serves a purpose beyond self-gratification: satisfy Saito and he may see his family again (or may not, ask Nolan). Memento isn't the only Nolan film called to mind; Inception functions as a collage of his entire filmography to date. Here's the sage advice of Michael Caine, there's the wonderfully choreographed gunfight out of The Dark Knight.

Cobb is the maker of worlds, the deceiver, and ultimately, the cold center of a film that, while mind-blowing, leaves us wanting. Dreams within dreams is a cool idea, especially when each one is a new lavish action set-piece, but what is Nolan's goal with this film? To confuse the audience as to what is real and what's imagined? That's not a very high bar to set, especially for him. To baffle us all with city-rolling special effects? Again, 200 mil goes a long way. Inception is an expensive parlor trick from the master of them, but we come away from the final stomach punch twist saying: who cares?

This sense comes from the fact that despite the upper-case ORIGINALITY practically wafting off this picture, we've seen quite a bit of it before. Though audiences are jumping out of their seats at the final cut to black to pronounce Nolan the next Kubrick, he is quite a ways off (his by the book 2001 reference may be read as a paying of dues). As cool as Joe Gordon Levitt looks crawling around like a spider in a gravity-free environment, more than a few people will be reminded of The Matrix, a reality bending sci-fi picture now a decade old. And the dream-within-dream-within-dream sequence seems cut from an old James Bond film.

Inception is a triumph then in the cutting room, where all the threads of this rather flat story (it centers on corporate espionage, for crying out loud) are woven together into a frock far prettier than its materials. Sure, it is a marvel of screenwriting and editing to weave together four (or five, or six, or...) levels of reality at once into a cohesive thriller. There is no question you will have to sort a few things out to even begin to understand it, but Nolan's academic exercise veers so far away from reality we have to ask ourselves whether such pondering is worth it. Inception comes off as an over-budgeted NYU film school project, or a flashy, less confusing version of Primer. Without Leonardo DiCaprio and an orgy of folding buildings, it would be a flavor of the week, or more likely a cautionary tale to ambitious youngsters about how to not fling themes rights in the audience's face. Mesmerizing in the moment, but utterly shabby when one begins to unpack it in the moments after the "big reveal". If not The Matrix, then perhaps the Fight Club for those who hit puberty after 9/11.

[Note: Spoilers appear after symbolic imagery]

SECONDARY SPOILER ALERT: So what was with that ending anyway? Two directions we can go, 1) the top is still spinning, so the entire film has been a dream, or 2) the top is about to topple and Nolan is merely toying with us. Since the latter seems something of an insult, does Inception negate its entire relevance in the final moment? If Inception is, in its entirety a dream (that collapsing corridor in the Mumbasa chase scene certainly supports this theory), than who is having the dream? With his slicked back hair and not quite sexy stubble, Cobb might be a stand-in for Nolan himself - is this too obvious? I don't think so.

However, let's backtrack. Leo's totem seemed to originate in Limbo, where Mal kept it in her holy of holies. So it isn't his totem? It is? Where does it first exist? Nolan's insistence on flipping over the chess board of his film in the final seconds suggests a need to be profound at the end of a film that has lacked such moments. Nolan loves his toys, from the polaroids in Memento to the bouncing ball in The Prestige; however here the top is just a top, and whether dream or real, spins indifferently, with no reference to the outside world. Cool-looking, aloof and really drawn out; the movie in a nutshell.

Not on Pandora: Predators

The setup is pure pulp: a ragtag group of murderers, soldiers for hire and desperate sinners are los in a deadly wilderness, forced to rely on one another for survival. The concept is nothing new; the audience will gleefully watch the group get whittled down one by one, until our main characters have their final confrontation. If this film were set on earth, it might have been directed by Anthony Mann; however, it is not. Nimrod Antal's Predators brings order to a franchise with simple formulae, and in doing so delivers one of the most successful reboots in recent memory.

Of course, "best reboot" might not be much of a compliment, especially when we look back on the other recent Ahnuld-without-Ahnuld franchise continuation, Terminator Salvation. Salvation destroyed the small-scale tension and methodical pursuit of the franchise, instead blowing it out with Transformers-like killbots, a swaggerlicious performance by Christian Bale, and more high-concept, hard to explain mythology than the matrix. Character, plot and legitimate thrills were all sacrificed for a post-apocalyptic "look", merely a ripoff of Mad Max and other films of that ilk. Salvation was an update, an unpleasant reminder that while in 1984 a blockbuster could just be one mean robot hunting a woman across modern day Los Angeles, in 2009, the audience demanded swarms of robots, stupid twists and a couple of talentless super models gumming up the works.

Antal intends no such modern retelling of the Predator story, which is to begin with, razor-thin. Instead of a cohesive unit of Marines ambushed in the Guatemalan jungle, eight strangers awake in free fall, plummeting into the murky jungle of an alien planet. Four soldiers from countries with checkered diplomacy (the U.S., Russia, Somalia and Israel) two gangsters (one Mexican, the other Japanese) a death-row inmate and Topher Grace; already we've got more diversity and possible internal turmoil than original director John McTiernan ever dreamed of. At first assuming they are a part of a behavioral experiment, the prey soon realize they are being hunted and must team up to defeat an otherworldly enemy.

Taking Predator away from earth might be an irresistible temptation to some to introduce us to an alien civilization, or introduce a series of details unimportant to those who came to see some all-american ass-kicking. A sequence where the humans are attacked by a group of hunting animals recalls the plethora of new breeds marched across the screen in Avatar; only here, each moment of CGI (and there are only a few) serves a specific purpose. Mostly, the jungle looks like earth, and the plants look like plants. Antal and producer Robert Rodriguez understand what makes Predator great - they do not add one unnecessary bell or whistle. Even the super cheesy heat vision is still there.

Oddly enough for a mid-budget sci-fi actioner, one of Predators' greatest strengths is its cast, presided over by the largely unconvincing Adrien Brody (the comeback started in Splice continues). His lack of presence (call him the anti-Bale) allows for each of those condemned to the game preserve to have their juicy moment. Brody might be a recognizable face, but he is by no means a star, and willfully cedes moments to the other malcontents, most humorously Walton Goggins as the serial rapist/murderer. The film's most entrancing and surprising piece of acting comes from cameo by Laurence Fishburne, who channels fat Orson Welles in his portrayal of a long-time survivor of the planet.

Characters aside, we just bought these tickets to see man kick some predator butt, and boy does he. From  the hurtling-through-mid-air opening to the jungle-burning conclusion, Predators wastes not a second on answering questions or developing backstory. Yet when Brody and his remaining companion arrive at the coda alive, surrounded by rotting meat and cinders, they are by no means saved. Predators ends on a wonderfully ambiguous down note, and a new hunt begins.

The Kids Are Cold-Blooded Killers

This might be a still from your average teen movie, where kids cruise around listening to top 40 hits and getting into trouble when parties get out of hand. Little Miss Popular might be looking for Mr. Right and the lone male outsider might be looking for a way to fit in. She and he would find each other by the third act, perhaps thanks to their unconventional friends, or an amazing road trip. However, this was taken from Bully, the second film by Larry Clark (Kids), so no happy ending or harmless hijinx lie ahead for those ravers in the convertible. It's not the world of Britney Spears and bubblegum - rather, shallow nihilism and ignorant destruction.

Marty (Brad Renfro) is a high-school dropout, a loser with a pretty face under the thumb of his best friend / pimp Bobby (Nick Stahl). When Marty starts dating the feisty Lisa (Rachel Miner), she and her friends decide to put Bobby's abusive behavior to and end once and for all, by killing him. They enlist a host of unnecessary accomplices from Lisa's a "professional" hitman (Leo Fitzpatrick, who makes a living playing young men on the margins of society, in Kids and on The Wire) to a pair of sex crazed drug addicts (Bijou Philips and Michael Pitt). Fitzpatrick's presence aside, this seems like the cast of a very promising dramedy about growing up. Clark instead lets Bully unfold as the darkest of comedies, as one youth after another lets themself get drawn, mostly at Lisa's urging, into deeper and deeper trouble. Their doom is inevitable; the only natural response to their stupidity and the thoughtless brutality they inflict upon Bobby is nervous laughter.

Clark will probably always be better known for Kids, his barebones verite look at HIV in the inner city. The film one makes after becoming a hot property can be the trickiest - Bully takes his trademark no frills look at drugs and sex among the young and combines it with more mainstream genre filmmaking. Part noir, part midnight movie, Bully is not hard to watch like Kids - the principals seem less like animals in a zoo and more like people to whom the audience can actually relate. Like the action genre, films aimed at teens with characters still in high school rarely ring true. Transferring those adolescent concerns into the true-crime world is a compelling feat, and certainly not one that translates to box office success.

A few years later, Nick Cassevetes built upon Clark's film with Alpha Dog, another true story of teenage murderers, this time with the added element of class. The victim this time, oddly enough, is the hitman himself, Frankie (Justin Timberlake). After kidnapping the younger brother of a deadbeat who owes his friend Johnny Truelove (Emil Hirsch) money, Frankie bonds with the still innocent kid, only to find out he has to kill his new friend. Johnny, the real villain of the story, doesn't have to get his hands dirty - he's too rich for that. Where Bully reminded us of the "true story" aspect only in the end titles, Alpha Dog is constantly displaying witness names and numbers, as well as cutaway interview conducted after the fact. Where Bully went from feel good sex comedy to fatalistic noir, Alpha Dog takes it further into mockumentary, the sheltered world of Clueless and Can't Hardly Wait pushed closer and closer to the real.

What these two films both do is complicate and explore the bully-prey relationship. The blonde, muscled jerk with the money and the posse has been a teen-movie staple for decades, but not until these two films has the archetype been explored for all its pitch-black possibilities. In both cases, the bully comes from a better upbringing than his familiars, and has a future the others do not. In a Western, he might be the merciless landowner. What makes Bully and Alpha Dog a more compelling take on the master-slave relationship is that we are used to thinking of high school in rosy terms. Anything can be forgiven at that age - or so we think.


The teen movie, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to the present, has been a hollow, materialistic world, and though satirized (as in Heathers), has rarely been entirely deconstructed. Clark and Cassevetes decided to treat the characters as people, not just beautiful objects. And like American Psycho and The Wild Bunch before them, these films challenge our initial impressions of , and reveal the haphazard violence and commonplace evil underneath.

Cyrus

Since the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, major studios have paid plenty of lip service to independent comedies. Just about every year America gets served another zany, heart-warming film that doesn't quite fit the Hollywood mold. However, just because Juno and Little Miss Sunshine had small budgets does not mean they were groundbreaking works of art. These fake-independents have the same gags, formulas and wackiness of summer comedies, just delivered at awards season. With the exception of Alexander Payne's Sideways, these by-the-book quirk-fests all run together more or less. That might be due to the fact that no fresh voices are getting into the writer's rooms - it's a new song, but the same singers.

The same cannot be said of Cyrus, a film that shows what a solid cast handed over to legitimate filmmakers can produce. Mumblecore icons Mark and Jay Duplass make their first foray into the mainstream with the tale of a lonely man (John C. Reilly) starting a relationship with the woman (Marisa Tomei) and her adult son (Jonah Hill). Quiet and quick, Cyrus is an unassuming love story that combines familiar actors in familiar roles, yet emerges with something fresh and touching. Reilly as the middle-aged loser or Tomei as the single mother is nothing new, but under the watchful eye of the Duplass brothers, we see these characters as people rather than tropes.

However, the shocking news of the summer has to be that Jonah Hill can act. His turn as an overwhelmed music industry handler held together the otherwise shaky Get Him to the Greeek; in Cyrus, we see him stretch his range outside the protection of the Apatow universe. When A-list funnymen like Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen have done their "serious, gritty" films, they play their usual selves with a more interesting script; on the other hand, Hill is revealing his abilities a serious actor, one who chooses films rather than having them written for him. Cyrus is a fragile, precocious young man who reacts to Reilly's presence the only way he can: with passive aggression. He goes from vulnerable to evil at the flip of a switch, encouraging his mother's guilt and Reilly's rage.

This might be all different if Cyrus was still a child, but in his early twenties, this is a movie about three adults trying to carve out their own comfortable emotional space. That might seem less entertaining than pratfalls, toilet humor and endless name-calling, but it makes for a film that is both funny and believable. Add to that the extreme economy of the filmmaking (there are about five speaking parts and as many locations) and we have a small-scale dramedy worthy of comparison to Cassevetes.

The Duplass brothers, among others, are trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to independent filmmaking, stripping the budgets and the frills down to the minimum. The 80 minutes of Cyrus fly by, and one leaves the theatre not complaing the film was too long, but rather amazed at how briskly it moved and came to a resolution. This is a rare thing, especially when it comes to the comedies. Earlier this summer, Hill (and the audience) was forced to sleepwalk through 15 minutes of ham-fisted relationship talk at the conclusion of Greek. This time, such concerns are distributed evenly throughout; we do not have to eat our vegetables at the end, so to speak. People's feelings don't crop up at certain points in a funny story; they are always at the surface. Cyrus is a summer comedy without a gag or elaborate setpiece; and it's all the better for it.