This Must be the Place is a film directed and written by Paolo Sorrentino around the idea that Sean Penn would play the titular character, which is an wealthy middle-aged former rock star bored of his retirement days and takes on a Nazi hunting quest to avenge his father’s tormentor who is living as a refugee somewhere in the United States. Outrageously absurd concept or what? You bet! This comedic drama still succeeds to be hilarious, emotional and very up lifting at the end and Sean Penn gives a great performance as “Cheyenne” the protagonist.
There barely are any major supporting characters, mainly due to Cheyenne’s adventure across America which also becomes a soul searching adventure for him and his character progression, but the few notable ones would be Jane (portrayed Frances McDormand), Mordecai Middler the Nazi Hunter (Judd Hirsch) and Mary’s Mother played by Olwen Fouéré. The rest are rather side characters, but they’re pretty darn hilarious characters from a hardcore Christian woman who married a Nazi to David Byrne playing himself to some random guy playing Batman! Yeah, Batman makes a cameo here! Sadly he happens to be an overweight middle aged Texas cowboy ranger, but that’s still pretty darn awesome. Oh yeah and some random Indian man who needed a lift to the middle of the road so he could die in peace? Outrageous!
The filmography is visually pleasing, you got very wide shows of the environment and other locations, good cuts from scene to another and not even that many jump cuts at all from dialogue to another, I really enjoyed the way the movie was filmed. The music takes a good focus obviously and to me it was very pleasurable. David Byrne does an original song for the movie and the original soundtrack seemed fun enough to listen to.
The movie comes with a very heartwarming coming to full circle character conclusion for Cheynne that was very uplifting for me. So yeah, I’ll gladly recommend this movie to everyone, not just the Sean Penn fans, but fans of comedies and dramas in general. It’s absurd story concept seems silly, but this is really all about Sean Penn acting an over the top character and that’s pretty funny for me.
