The film was an Italian-majority production with co-producers in France and Ireland. Principal photography began in August, 2010. Filming took place in Ireland and Italy, as well as the states of Michigan, New Mexico, and New York. The film was in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Plot
Cheyenne is a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his 20-year retirement in Dublin. He retired after two of his teenaged fans committed suicide.[3] He travels to New York to reconcile with his estranged father during his final hours, only to arrive too late. The reason he gives for not communicating with his father for 30 years was that his father rejected him when he put on goth make-up at the age of 15. He reads his father's diary and learns about his father's persecution in Auschwitz at the hands of former SS officer Alois Lange. He visits a professional Nazi hunter named Mordecai Midler who tells him that Lange is small fry.
Cheyenne begins a journey across the United States to track down Lange. Cheyenne finds the wife of Lange, Lange's granddaughter and a businessman. He buys a large gun. At the gun shop, a bystander delivers a soliloquy about a certain type of pistol that allows people to "kill with impunity," and given that ability, "if we’re licensed to be monsters we end up having just one desire – to truly be monsters."
When Cheyenne eventually tracks Lange down with the aid of Mordecai, Lange, now blind, says that he received mail from Cheyenne's father for decades. Lange recounts the incident that led to Cheyenne's father's obsession with Lange, in which Cheyenne's father peed his pants from fear. Lange describes this as a "minor incident" in comparison to the true horrors of Auschwitz, but mentions that he came to admire the man's single-minded determination to dedicate his life to making his own miserable. Cheyenne takes a photo of Lange and whispers that it was an injustice for his father to die before Lange did. Cheyenne forces the old blind man to walk out into the salt flats naked, like a Holocaust victim; skin and bones and numb with fear. Cheyenne and Mordecai drive away soon afterwards, leaving him still standing in the flats.
Cheyenne travels home by airplane (something he previously feared), cuts his rock-star hair and stops wearing his goth make-up, jewelry, and outfits.
Fritz Weaver as the voice of Cheyenne's deceased father
Production
Teaser poster of This Must Be the Place.
Paolo Sorrentino said Sean Penn told him he wanted to work with him after seeing Sorrentino's film Il Divo at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where Penn headed the jury.[4] With Penn in mind, Sorrentino wrote the screenplay for This Must Be the Place with Umberto Contarello.[4] Sorrentino had for a long time been fascinated by Nazi war criminals who had managed to keep their former crimes secret, and went on to live ordinary lives. To add an element of irony to a story about such a person, Sorrentino came up with Penn's character: "a slow, lazy, rock star who was bored enough and closed in his self-referential world to the point of being, seemingly, the last person who would embark on a crazy search for a Nazi criminal, probably dead by now, across the United States."[5] Sorrentino was attracted to this juxtaposition as it would add a great risk of failure, which he considers vital for the prospect of a story to be good. In selecting the name of the rock star and his band, Sorrentino thought of what he considered the most inspired names in rock star history, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and changed it into "Cheyenne and the Fellows".[5] The look of the character was inspired by Robert Smith of The Cure.[5] Sorrentino had seen The Cure perform several times in his youth, and when he saw them again in 2008, he was fascinated by the fact that Smith, even off the stage, still wore the same kind of attire as in the past:
Here was a fifty-year-old who still completely identified with a look which, by definition, is that of an adolescent. But there was nothing pathetic about it. There was just this one thing that, in the movies and in life, creates an incredible feeling of wonder: the extraordinary, a unique and thrilling exception.[5]
As soon as the screenplay was finished, Sorrentino sent it to Penn, who accepted the starring role.[5]
This Must Be the Place was Sorrentino's first film to be shot in English.[6] The film had a production budget of US$28 million.[1] Production was led by the three Italian companies Indigo Film, Lucky Red and Medusa Film. Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo invested €2.5 million ($3 million) in the film,[1] while Eurimages provided €600,000 ($750,000) in funding.[7] The film also received funding from France and Ireland.[5]
Original music for the film was written by David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads. The title of the film is a tribute to the Talking Heads song "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)". The original songs for the film are co-written with indie singer-songwriter Will Oldham.[10] New York-based singer songwriter Michael Brunnock sings these songs for which they won a David di Donatello award.[11][12] The songs were not sung by Penn but by another character in the film.[10]
Release
This Must Be the Place premiered on May 20, 2011, in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival.[13] It was additionally screened in the Spotlight section of the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012.[14] The film made its theatrical debut in the United States on October 14, 2012.[15]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 67%, based on 87 reviews, with an average rating of 6.2/10. The website's consensus reads, "This Must Be the Place may feature too many wayward detours to satisfy some passengers, but Sean Penn's beguiling performance and Paolo Sorrentino's scenic visuals make this a road trip worth following."[16] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 61 out of 100, based on reviews from 29 critics.[17]
Tom Keough of The Seattle Times called This Must Be the Place "an ill-conceived dramedy with a shockingly annoying performance by Sean Penn, [that] can't really figure out what kind of movie it's supposed to be."[18]
Jay Weissberg of Variety called This Must Be the Place "that rare film directed by a non-American that gets not just the locales but also the cadence of the language absolutely right, with a script full of great lines and images of lingering beauty." Regarding the acting, Weissberg wrote that "Penn's flawless performance has none of the mannered intensity that can mark his work, transcending the mask-like qualities of eyeliner and lipstick with deadpan, childlike candor."[19]
