Cherry
I do not often start reviews by discussing the financial compensation individual collaborators received, but with “Cherry,” I hope that author Nico Walker, who based his novel on his own experiences, was well compensated. I’m sure there’s some talent and heart that comes through in the novel that is just not coming out of the film, and he can at least sleep well knowing that his story was brought to the screen with no expenses spared. At least, I would imagine that Apple+ spared no expense; if not, maybe Walker would have been better served waiting a bit longer.
I’m fascinated that Anthony and Joe Russo, coming off of their massively-successful two-part “Avengers” films, would choose a story about an military veteran coming home, and turning to a life of crime, as their follow-up. That they would bring along Spider-Man, aka Tom Holland, to play the main character is not surprising- before he became the third live-action Peter Parker in 20 years, Holland gave a harrowing, tremendous performance in “The Impossible.” I can buy Holland in the role of Cherry (the main character who’s a stand-in for Walker), a kid from Ohio who gets married to his sweetheart before going into the military, and then suffers from PTSD after his tour has ended, and turns to a life of crime. The problem is, this just feels like too heavy material for the Russos, who made their name directing sitcoms like “Arrested Development” and “Community” before jumping to Marvel films. If the goal is to make the film a bit pulpier, and some of the choices they make in telling the story feel in that vein, that’s one thing; but the last 15-20 minutes of this movie didn’t get the memo, and that’s not a good thing.
In 2006, I started to make a short film I had written with some friends. The hope was that it would be something dramatically interesting, and maybe lead to a career in filmmaking. There are a lot of reasons it went incompleted, and they’re some of the same reasons why, with distance, I can recognize it as a terrible film, and it’s no one’s fault but my own. While I took into account budgetary limitations and continuity, I can also tell that while, on the page, it works, as a piece of filmmaking, some choices don’t work so well. Watching “Cherry” reminded me of some of those choices that, when put on the screen, don’t work so well. On the page, from the first-person perspective of the main character, having banks called “The Bank” or “Bank Fucks America” or a character called “Father Whomever” can work, as it’s a way of getting us into the character’s point-of-view, on the screen, when you’re building a world that is akin to our own, unless the film is explicitly set in a fictional world a la the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or meant to be satirical), those things just don’t play, and feel lazy. The Russos can’t thread that needle, while also making a film that deals with the trauma of being up-close to death, or pushed to make choices like turning to a life of crime when addiction puts you on the brink of financial ruin, with any seriousness. Reading up on the production, a possible directorial choice before the Russos was James Franco- he might have made this work.
“Cherry” is 140 minutes long, and begins with Cherry walking us through how he goes about robbing a bank before taking us back to 2002. In 2002, he is a college student, and has a crush on a girl in one of his classes (Emily, played by Ciara Bravo). When Emily is getting ready to move to Montreal for a job is when he enlists in the military. She doesn’t want to leave, though, and they get married before he goes to basic training. We see him going through training, and then on tour in the Middle East. After he gets out, Cherry and Emily try to make a life for themselves, but the nightmares of what he witnessed overseas are taking a toll. He gets hooked on pills, and when his GI Bill is not enough cover expenses, he resorts to robbing banks. There is more to the narrative than that, but I’m trying not to give everything away.
“Cherry” is a film that’s too long, too tonally-confused when it wants to be weighty, and too self-serious when it wants to be entertaining. At least one of those qualities can be worked through in something as big and crazy as the MCU, but when you’re building a realistic world to tell a story of addiction and desperation, it just won’t work. If you want to watch a film of the struggles of PTSD, there are few that are better than Kimberly Pierce’s “Stop-Loss.” My hope after watching “Cherry” is that the Russos find their lane as filmmakers post-Marvel, and Holland just sees this as a misstep, and is able to find a combination of material and filmmaker that’s stronger in his next non-Marvel film.
