If I had seen Cyrus while working on my "year end" list, it would have fallen right in the middle; there's really nothing wrong with the movie, but at the same time there's nothing exceptional about it. The film, written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Baghead) is a by the numbers romantic comedy, right down to the predictable ending, presented under the auspices of an "indie" cinema. The catch is that, unlike the low budget Baghead or The Puffy Chair, Cyrus was produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, and despite their efforts to disguise the production values, the film is too conventional for anyone to by the mumble-y dialogue or gently-strummed-high-pitched-whisper song soundtrack.The Duplass brothers do try to trick their fans into thinking Cyrus is more than a by-the-numbers romantic comedy: the camera work is designed to look like an "on the fly," caught in real time cinema verite, at least for a while. Before long, they begin to indulge in montages with dialogue that leaps forward and backward with the image**, and then the camera seems to settle down into "master/close up/reverse shot" setups. So too does the awkward, "mumblecore" dialogue begin to shift to the more traditional, and characters cease to behave like humans and simply behave according to story devices.
Story-wise, Cyrus falls into the "man-child" genre of comedies that Judd Apatow and Adam McKay have been occupying for the last six or seven years; John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill are essentially playing variations of their "type" - Reilly as the soft spoken, awkward loser and Hill as the sarcastic jerk. The only real difference is the level to which Hill pushes Cyrus into a manipulative sociopath; he just barely keeps himself out of stereotypical territory, despite all of the blank stares, muttered threats, and bogus "panic attacks."
Marisa Tomei has virtually nothing to work with as an actress: as the film progresses, Molly becomes less of a character and more of a cipher, an object for the emotionally stunted man-boys to fight over. By the time her character goes catatonic when John finally leaves, one struggles to remember the woman who saw past his act early in the story. Catherine Keener and Matt Walsh have absolutely nothing to do outside of giving Cyrus a "supporting cast": Walsh is barely in the film and Keener's Jamie is saddled with all of the "am I just being neurotic or is the kid evil" rants from John. Since Cyrus is transparently manipulative, Keener's assurances that he's "weird, but not in a bad way" are hollow to the audience.
I realize I sound like I'm panning Cyrus, which is being unkind to the film; I tend to be very hard on films that settle for being in the "middle": movies like Cyrus don't actually try to do anything that sets it apart from every other comedy of its kind, nor is it bad enough to simply ignore. John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill are all doing good work with what they have, and the film at least tries to insert a modicum of "realism" into an otherwise trite rom-com dynamic. Aside from the ending, everything that happens is organic within the story, derived from things unsaid or from character traits. The problem is that I just can't get that enthused about Cyrus: there's not enough going for it to merit recommending, and at the same time I don't hate it (the same way I do, say, Juno, which is as transparently obvious in its storytelling). Cyrus is just there, and for me that's not enough.
* The film is so vague about John's job that it isn't actually clear he's a film editor until he barges into Jamie's office (where he also works, although that's not clear until even later) to talk conspiratorially about Cyrus.
**I'm tempted to call this the Soderbergh effect, since it's one of his most relied on techniques, but that presumes that he invented the style instead of co-opting it from films like Point Blank
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