VANITY FAIR – Cherry is a movie that dares you to try and describe it. It’s the first film that Anthony and Joe Russo have directed following their Avengers finales, Infinity War and Endgame, and it reunites them with Spider-Man star Tom Holland. It also compresses their penchant for large-scale action and cataclysm into the core of a single person.
Holland’s title character is both volatile and vulnerable, a hard-knock nobody from Cleveland who’s just scraping by but doesn’t even have any big dreams to guide him. Every solution to his problems only deepens the trouble: College isn’t working out, so Cherry joins the Army to serve in Iraq as a medic. He returns home haunted and damaged, and starts abusing opioids to blunt his PTSD. To pay for the drugs, he resorts to bank robbery. The more desperate he gets, the more banks he has to rob.
Every step is a step down, a progression into the abyss you can see in these images from Vanity Fair’s exclusive first look.
It’s tempting to call this film, which hits theaters first on February 26 and then premieres globally on Apple TV+ on March 12, a smaller, more intimate project from the brothers who made some of Marvel’s most grandiose films. It’s definitely a passion project for them. But Cherry is also a sprawling tale that ventures around the world, albeit locked within the mind of Holland’s sweet-natured, grimly addicted bandit.
“We do think about it as an epic film, and it is very much a person’s life journey,” said Anthony Russo. “But it does have a little bit of a split personality between being this character study and an epic life cycle.”
They described Cherry as six movies in one, spanning from the mid 2000s to the present. “He travels a great distance over a 15-year period,” Joe Russo said. “The movie’s broken up into six chapters that reflect those different periods, and each one has a different tone. It’s shot with different lenses, different production design. One’s got magical realism. Another chapter is absurdism. Another is horror…There’s a bit of gonzo in it. It’s raw in its tone. He’s a character in existential crisis.”
Based on the 2018 novel by Nico Walker, the screenplay was written by the filmmakers’ sister, Angela Russo-Otstot (V, The Shield), and Jessica Goldberg (The Path). “The book was very, very self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-loathing,” Joe said.
They felt a strong connection, even if the story doesn’t necessarily mirror their own. It’s close enough: “We’re from Cleveland and Nico’s from Cleveland. Interestingly enough, we know a lot of people that are implied in the book,” Joe added. “I think he’s fictionalized names and personalities. But I worked at the same restaurant that Nico worked at, 10 years apart. So he had a very similar upbringing to us. He just had a very different journey than we did.”
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