I watched this last night. I liked the character of Cheyenne a great deal. Sean Penn's performance was for me the centre of this film, especially the dialogue that was sometimes very sharp and unexpected. It must be said however that the movie went on a lot of unnecessary tangents. Whole plot lines were opened up and then left unresolved. The biggest one seems to be the disappearance of the Irish boy Tony. There are several scenes involving Tony's mother, but they lead nowhere. Basically someone should have got into the script, cut all the flab out and focused on what is important here - the character of Cheyenne and his (mis)adventures.
If you had to categorise this movie you would probably put it in the "self-discovery/road movie" basket. Cheyenne is having a bit of a crisis, goes travelling and then rediscovers himself. Unfortunately in Cheyenne's world there is very little meaning to be found. Things happen arbitrarily, people launch into meaningless random conversations in almost every scene. The camera focuses on bizarre unrelated objects. It seems like there isn't very much to learn from a world like this, so the message I got was "you may as well be yourself". I was expecting the movie to end with Cheyenne back in Dublin, hugging his wife and saying something like "I guess I like things just the way they are." It was therefore surprising to me that there was only one scene with Cheyenne back in Dublin and it didn't involve his friends of family at all. Instead he is looking at the cranky mother who lost her son, and he is dressed as blandly as possible. It's difficult to draw any meaning from this scene, although it's possibly implying that he is now embarking on a "normal" life. It was a contradictory and a very dissatisfying conclusion.
If you had to categorise this movie you would probably put it in the "self-discovery/road movie" basket. Cheyenne is having a bit of a crisis, goes travelling and then rediscovers himself. Unfortunately in Cheyenne's world there is very little meaning to be found. Things happen arbitrarily, people launch into meaningless random conversations in almost every scene. The camera focuses on bizarre unrelated objects. It seems like there isn't very much to learn from a world like this, so the message I got was "you may as well be yourself". I was expecting the movie to end with Cheyenne back in Dublin, hugging his wife and saying something like "I guess I like things just the way they are." It was therefore surprising to me that there was only one scene with Cheyenne back in Dublin and it didn't involve his friends of family at all. Instead he is looking at the cranky mother who lost her son, and he is dressed as blandly as possible. It's difficult to draw any meaning from this scene, although it's possibly implying that he is now embarking on a "normal" life. It was a contradictory and a very dissatisfying conclusion.