Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Having already chalked up an impressive career as a playwright, Martin McDonagh made his directorial debut in 2006 with Oscar-winning short film ‘Six Shooter’, the promise of which he made good on in memorable style with ‘In Bruges’ in 2009. His sophomore feature film ‘Seven Psychopaths’ opened to mixed reviews in 2013 – admission: never seen it – and, after another four year gap, he returns with ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’.

Now, I fucking bloody loved ‘In Bruges’ (Agitation review here) and consider it a pitch perfect black comedy. But here’s the thing: watch the deleted scenes on the DVD and it comes abundantly clear that had they made the final cut, ‘In Bruges’ wouldn’t have been anywhere near pitch perfect. It would, tonally, have been all over the fucking place.

My guess is that either: (a) McDonagh had an on-the-ball producer on ‘In Bruges’ who knew exactly what did and didn’t work and instructed him to make cuts accordingly, or (b) unanimous test audience responses led to the same outcome.

I can’t claim that ‘Seven Psychopaths’ bolsters or diminishes the observation, not having seen it, but I would hazard a guess that no-one was around on ‘Three Billboards’ to bring to McDonagh’s attention the film’s really jarring tonal shifts. A blander, more boilerplate piece of work might have been sunk by them, but fortunately ‘Three Billboards’ has a hell of a lot to commend it despite its flaws.

Narratively, the first thing it put me in mind of was that Tolstoy novella about the forged promissory note, and how its passage around a provincial town negatively affects everyone involved. Just substitute raped and murdered teenager for forged promissory note and Ebbing, Missouri for provincial Russian town.

The victim of this heinous crime is Angela Hayes (Kathryn Newton). Seven months have passed since the atrocity and the local police department have given up on the case. Angela’s mother Mildred (Frances McDormand) responds by renting three billboards on the backwoods road where Angela was assaulted and killed – she raises the money by selling off a tractor/trailer belonging to her ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes), currently shacked up with his 19-year-old girlfriend Penelope (Samara Weaving) – and uses them to unsolved-crime-shame Ebbing sheriff Chief Willoughby (a never-better Woody Harrelson).

To put it mildly, Mildred stirs some shit. Or to put it another way, Mildred tears the bandage off Ebbing’s festering wound. Or to be it another way, if Lisbeth Salander in the novels by Stieg Larsson is the girl who kicked the hornets’ nest, then Mildred is the woman who smacked the hornets’ nest down to the ground, doused it in petrol, tossed a firecracker at it and shouted “yeah, bitch” as it went up in flames.

Mildred’s provocation has its most immediate effect on Willoughby, a man who has admitted that there’s little more he can do as regards Angela’s murder, and is also somewhat distracted by the requirements of setting his affairs in order on account of the fact that he’s dying of cancer. His terminal condition has an understandable knock-on effect on his younger wife Anne (Abbie Cornish: her best turn since ‘Bright Star’) and their two children.

Willoughby’s terminal condition doesn’t do much, either, for the equilibrium of his alcoholic short-fuse deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a man-child in thrall to his obnoxiously racist mother. Unable to vent his frustrations elsewhere, Dixon targets local entrepreneur Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), owner of the advertising company who lease Mildred the billboards. In the broadest of strokes – broad to the point of cliché – McDonagh’s script establishes Dixon as the villain of the piece, as stupid as he is dangerous, only to flip everything on its head.

At any one time, and sometimes with the two or three minute passage of one single scene, ‘Three Billboards’ functions as a black comedy, a procedural, a melodrama, a cautionary tale as regards the exponential consequences of wrong things done for the right reason (airhead Penelope’s “anger begets anger” scene is both laugh-out-loud funny and the intellectual cornerstone of the movie), and an enquiry into the nature of responsibility, forgiveness and atonement.

Atonement is where the film scores its most palpable hits – far more effectively than McDonagh’s brother’s recent outing ‘Calvary’, which attempts a similar enquiry – with scenes between Dixon and Red, and Dixon and Mildred, communicating far more than the understated sketches that McDonagh is wise enough to be satisfied with rather than making some sweeping moral statement.

It’s not exactly front page news to declare than understatement, inference and ambiguity communicate the big themes more effectively than tub-thumping or polemics. But it’s surprising how many artists, of whatever discipline, still haven’t twigged to this. McDonagh fumbles the ball in enough places that an overall less interesting film wouldn’t have survived the uneven tonal shifts, the hackneyed characterisations and the bludgeoningly obvious narrative tropes.

That ‘Three Billboards’ just about dodges its myriad self-fired bullets owes to a first-rate cast who invest in their characters to the hilt, and to McDormand in particular who effortlessly clears the twenty-year hurdle of her achievement in ‘Fargo’ to deliver her definitive performance and bring to life a character for the ages.

Now You See Me

Cineworld held a mystery film screening this evening, whipping up publicity by posting a series of downright oblique clues via Twitter. Messageboards were abuzz with speculation: many thought ‘Pacific Rim’, others plumbed for ‘The Lone Ranger’; when we booked the tickets, my wife was holding out for ‘The Wolverine’ while I had my fingers crossed for ‘The World’s End’. Ultimately, we were both disappointed. But at least it wasn’t two hours of CGI robots twatting aliens and then twatting each other. As we queued – interminably – I put a comment on FB to the effect that if it was ‘Pacific Rim’, I was going home.

We ended up not going home … well, not till the movie was over. We’d already agreed on the Half Hour Rule (if neither of us are digging a film at the half hour, we cut our losses and blow the joint). By minute thirty of ‘Now You See Me’, we were both enjoying it. By the time it was over, though, we had mixed feelings.

‘Now You See Me’ does several things right in very quick succession. It starts with a voiceover warning the audience that the closer they look, they less likely they’ll be to spot the trick. At the same time, a simple card trick plays out. The camera forces a very specific card on the viewer. It’s kind of a flipside to the opening of ‘The Prestige’. Where Christopher Nolan’s film clues you in to the three stages of an illusion, ‘Now You See Me’ deliberately sets out to obfuscate. It’s both a ballsy stroke of legerdemain and a self-defeating act: the longer ‘Now You See Me’ goes on, the more evident it is that director Louis Letterier wants his film to be a ‘Prestige’ for the Jerry Bruckheimer generation. But whereas ‘The Prestige’ has a genuine weighty human drama to anchor its more fanciful elements, ‘Now You See Me’ trades solely in the fanciful.

But let’s skip back to its opening reel. Having pulled a beautifully executed fast one on the audience, Letterier assembles his quartet of prestidigitatorial protagonists with superb economy, dealing out their vignettes like cards: street magician with a tendency to the theatrical J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist/shakedown artist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), glamorous escapologist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and new kid on the block Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). The narrative flings them together and has them pulled into the scheme of an unknown benefactor so quickly – the title card is a perfectly-timed punchline to the whole sequence – that their ineffably stupid names didn’t even begin to annoy me till a good halfway into the movie.

In equally quick succession, our foursome have been reimagined as a sell-out Vegas act who make headlines (and get themselves arrested) on account of an illusion based around a bank robbery. What pisses off the authorities, and gets Interpol newbie Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent) assigned to assisting rumpled sourpuss detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) – this really is That Movie Where Really Talented People Play Really One-Dimension Characters With Really Stupid Names – is the disappearance of a fuckton of Euros from a Parisian bank that tallies exactly with the magic trick.

The rest of the movie – or at least, the 75% of it that conspires to make you take your eye off the ball prior to the big reveal – is essentially Dylan and Alma vs. The Four Horsemen (thus the collective name the illusionists bill themselves as, notwithstanding that one of them is a woman), while vengeful impresario Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) and professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) hover in the wings nursing their own agendas.

‘Now You See Me’ is magnificently entertaining for a big chunk of its running time. Less than an hour in, I decided not to bother trying to second guess and just enjoy the ride. I’m glad I took that approach, because the whole improbably contrived plot pays off in a manner that, while not disappointing or in any way a cheat, is a little underwhelming. The essential problem with making a film about magic is that magic is a con. It’s smoke and mirrors; razzle dazzle; misdirection. It’s all surface and when you think about it too much, you dismiss it – rightly – as bullshit. ‘The Prestige’ is only superficially about magic – the real point of the film is the cost of the illusion; what you have to sacrifice to accomplish the seemingly impossible. To a lesser degree, Neil Burger’s ‘The Illusionist’ sets out its box of tricks as a backdrop to a tale of romance. ‘Now You See Me’ is entirely about the illusion, and as such starts to vaporise in a fog of its own insubstantiality the moment the end credits roll.

Zombieland

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedies / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 39 of 100

I sometimes think my wife should work for ‘Sight and Sound’. The result would be shorter and significantly less pretentious reviews. For example: as the end credits rolled on ‘Zombieland’, she remarked, “There was no point whatsoever to that film.”

Does that sound harsh? She wasn’t dissing ‘Zombieland’. In fact we’d both laughed uproariously through most of its brief 81-minute running time. But it’s an accurate point. As much as any zombie movie can be said to have a point beyond “group of (generally mismatched) survivors hole up against the undead and try to stay alive”, ‘Zombieland’ is singularly lacking in narrative, structure or character motivation.

And that’s kind of what makes it fun.

Most zombie movies lock themselves into a restricted locale scenario. A farmhouse, a shopping mall, an underground military installation or – in the quintessentially British spin ‘Shaun of the Dead’ puts on things – one’s local pub. ‘Zombieland’ thumbs its nose at convention and sets itself up as a zombie-ridden road movie. True, the genre has come close to (pardon the pun) going down this road before: ’28 Days Later’ and ‘Diary of the Dead’ permit their protagonists to be more mobile than is the norm. But for my money, ‘Zombieland’ is the first zombie movie that captures the authentic freewheeling aesthetic of a road movie.

Hell, the very first scene (following an hysterical slo-mo credits sequence that sets up urban America as a hotbed of zombie activity) has slacker-turned-survivalist Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) fending off a trio of flesh-munchers as he tries to fill his car up at a seemingly deserted gas station. Later, leaving the city sans automobile, he hitches a lift with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a man who blames the zombie infestation for creating a world which is becoming increasingly devoid of Twinkies. Later, the pair of them encounter teenage sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and some cat-and-mouse shenanigans ensue around who can claim ownership of Tallahassee’s pick-up truck.

Essentially, the foursome (a relationship based on mutual distrust gradually thawing to something that just about passes for comradeship) travel across America. They kill some zombies en route. They kill a fuckload more at the end of the journey. That’s about your lot. Motivations are basic: Columbus wants to get back to his home town to see if his parents are alive (pretty early into the film it’s suggested they won’t be); Wichita wants to protect her younger sister at all costs; Tallahassee just wants a Twinkie. It says something about characterisation when the protagonists are named after the towns of their birth.

Equally gimmicky is the frequently updated set of rules Columbus abides by, ranging from never trusting restrooms (you’re sat on the can, trousers round your ankles, at your most vulnerable; zombie crawls under the door, chomp, game over) to cardiac considerations (outrunning a zombie is only effective if you’re fit; fat people needn’t worry about being eaten – a massive coronary will bet them first). Every time Columbus invokes one of the rules, a flashback accompanies it while the rule itself floats across the screen in ‘Panic Room’-style lettering. It’s contrived, but utterly effective.

Midway through, however, we get the Mystery Guest (I’ll leave their identity under wraps just in case you’ve been on Mars or in solitary confinement for the last couple of years) and the film’s sometimes-cute-sometimes-acerbic humour suddenly gets weighted down. It’s a joke too far. ‘Zombieland’ becomes top-heavy as a result of it, particularly when scripters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick quickly have to rid themselves of said Mystery Guest in order to get things (quite literally) back on course again. The way they write him out is painfully obvious from the get-go.

Equally problematic is the funland finale. While an inspired location for a horror movie (see also Paco Plaza’s ‘A Christmas Tale’), the mechanics of the denouement require the hitherto more-than-capable Wichita and Little Rock to do two fairly stupid things in quick succession just so the boys can show up in eleventh-hour fashion and rescue them.

Minor complaints, I guess, when the film is so gut-busting funny the rest of the time, but still annoying when Reese and Werbick and director Ruben Fleischer gleefully disregard narrative conventions for much of the running time only to embrace the rustiest and creakiest of plot mechanics at the last hurdle.

A Prairie Home Companion

I’ve long been a fan of Garrison Keillor: the original radio broadcasts of ‘Lake Wobegon Days’ were homespun nostalgia in excelsis. The book was even better, a lovely, lyrical slice of Americana. With Robert Altman at the helm, Keillor’s timeless, poignant prose found its way into another medium and the result – ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ – is a perfectly cast, witty, subtle, cleverly observed ensemble piece.

It’s also a swansong. A summation.

As much as I wish Altman could have made more films (after the release of ‘Short Cuts’, his multi-narrative Raymond Carver adaptation, he hinted he was planning two more Carver films), it’s fitting that ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ was his last. It’s so perfect and quintessentially Altman in so many ways.

‘M*A*S*H’, the film that made the director’s name and allowed him to plough an eccentric and unique furrow through American cinema, established him as a master of overlapping scenes; with ‘Nashville’, ‘Short Cuts’ and ‘Gosford Park’ he put together ensemble casts par excellence; ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘The Player’ acerbically satirised the institutions of the military and Hollywood respectively.

All of these qualities (which are the keynotes to his best films) are present in ‘A Prairie Home Companion’. Parochial radio stations, corporate and personal self-importance, the lachrymose excesses of Country & Western music - all are gently, but effectively, sent up. Scenes overlap, character interrelationships merge and diverge and interlink. The cast is as eclectic as any Altman ever assembled: Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Lindsay Lohan, L.Q. Jones (a stalwart of Sam Peckinpah's films), Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly (the last two hilarious as a musical comedy duo).

Most poignantly of all, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ is a film about endings. The death of its director, shortly after its completion, bestows upon the film an extra quality. And I’m still unsure as to how deeply this influences my appreciation of the film; seeing for the first time at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema, it sent me out of the auditorium with a tear in my eye, but how much of that was wrapped up in Altman’s passing? Catching the film on TV recently, a late night screening and a couple of glasses of wine already consumed, my reaction was similar.

If ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ had been made by any other (and crucially, still-living) director, would my perspective be different? How far does the heart rule the head?