O’Connor’s strength was her lack of sentiment. (But the best O’Connor-like details are, of course, the subtlest: a knockout shot of a gentle turtle on the lap of sleeping Momma Dixon, a cigar-store Ma Jarrett played with steely gruffness by Sandy Martin.)Įvans’ strength was his pithiness. O’Connor would have made a great story out of only one of the various incidents smashed together in “Three Billboards”: Mildred drives a dentist’s drill into his thumb, Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) throws Red from his second-story office window and punches out his hapless assistant Pamela, a stupidly corny deer, an even stupider caricature of Millennials (two of the film’s falsest notes), countless counts of arson, American imperialist wrong-doings and suicides. Cruel people in a cruel world whose fleeting revelations (of a divine nature in O’Connor but never in McDonagh) only accentuate the cruelty. O’Connor, too, is a silent witness to the grotesquerie of “Three Billboards.” When Mildred enters the advertising agency to rent out the billboards, the head of the company, Red (Caleb Landry Jones), is seen reading O’Connor’s 1955 short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” McDonagh throws down one hell of a challenge for himself: Conjure up the precision of O’Connor’s world for modern 2017. The billboards’ content is more fantastical and showy than anything Evans would have cared to touch: three electric-red billboards, on the same road where Angela was found, each more cutting than the last: “RAPED WHILE DYING” - “AND STILL NO ARRESTS?” - “HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?” Before Mildred hatches her Big Plan, the billboards resemble an Evans photo: oddball snatches of capitalist ad talk (“of your life!” “worth shopping for”) and wonderfully weird imagery that stands outside of time-space-place (the body of a cherubic 50s-era baby is split in two, like a Cubist painting, by modern graffiti tags).Īfter Mildred’s Big Plan, “Three Billboards” quickly morphs into a Walker Evans picture gone wrong. Seven months on, the town’s chief of police Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) has not come closer to arresting the man responsible.
She plays Mildred Hayes, the mother of a teenager named Angela, who was brutally raped and murdered (burned alive - the body, charred beyond recognition) on a stretch of road, lined with three decrepit billboards, outside the titular town. It’s guided by the spirits of two key masters of the American vernacular: photographer Walker Evans and writer Flannery O’Connor. To help, the film brings into the fold a modern master of her own: resolute Frances McDormand, who centers the work as she did “Olive Kitteridge” (2014) and “Fargo” (1996). That’s perhaps the biggest flaw of this Icarus film’s high sights. Whereas Renoir would take us within the French character, McDonagh is wary of American interiority, so he keeps his camera neatly on the outside with the exception of McDormand, we never feel like we inhabit a world through the characters. The “Three Billboards” player is hateful first, pretty loathsome second, human last (very, very last). Instead of Renoir’s soft, flux-like people drawn with pastel hues of patience, McDonagh’s people are talky political abstracts who are either violently one thing or violently another. In “Three Billboards,” McDonagh gives the classic Jean Renoir motto “everybody has their reasons” an anti-Renoir approach.
#Three billboards outside ebbing missouri summary update#
But they’re our way into this intriguing film, Martin McDonagh’s sometimes-annoyingly-2017 update on the theme of Little Gal/Guy versus the System. The supers look on in wide-mouthed horror when men are thrown out of windows, beat to a bloody pulp or kicked in the balls by a jaded mom, the town pariah. In a way, we are those nameless supers: gawking (or looking away), mouth agape at the willful nastiness of this small-town film. This diverse crew of background players (black, white, Mexican, cameramen, school moms) often don’t have lines or names. The people I feel closest to in “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” are the people who don’t talk.
0 kommentar(er)
