This Won Best Drama at the Golden Globes, But...

I have to say I quite liked Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. And I think I liked it for an odd couple of reasons. What I mean is that the reasons that I was into the movie now feel sort of odd to me since it is getting so many accolades... and also now getting trashed by other folks. (Trashing a Best Picture winner is called backlash, of course, and all movies that move into the frontrunner position get trashed, so this is to be expected.)

The thing is, I don't like Martin McDonagh's work. (Or his brother's work, if I'm honest.) And I should like it, right? I mean, theatre people love Martin McDonagh, especially my students. They love his plays The Lieutenant of Inishmore and that one about child torture – what's that one called? – The Pillowman. My students (perpetually in their 20s) and many many other people seem to love McDonagh. And I have heard no one say a negative word about his film In Bruges, a movie that everyone seemed to love. But I find McDonagh (both McDonaghs) to be cynical and, well, ethically questionable. I find them frustrating in their treatment of violence as mostly funny. They take this amused point of view toward violence that makes it seem like getting punched in the face or falling down stairs or getting a drill pushed through a thumb is cause for laughter. I've complained about this before here (while talking about John Michael McDonagh's film Calvary) and here (while talking about 7 Psychopaths).

I love McDonagh's early play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and his work began in the UK during a period I positively adore in the 1990s called In-Yer-Face theatre or New Brutalism – the time of Tracey Emin and the YBAs. This is a time period that is actually characterized by violence and drug use and onstage sex acts. But those plays almost always are very careful about the way they present violence. They're interested in asking the audience to think differently about the violence they're witnessing. The plays ask for a new ethics of violence or at least a rethinking of the ethics of violence to which we are accustomed. McDonagh's work doesn't do that (as far as I can tell).

Ok. But. I actually thought that Three Billboards sort of grabbed ahold of this and made it work. The film is an odd amalgam of violent images, cheap sentiment, and real ethical quandaries. And to my mind it worked much better than most McDonagh – including In Bruges and 7 Psychopaths – and it asked me to think about some interesting things.

The plot of Three Billboards is that a woman whose daughter has been raped and murdered and then burned until she is unrecognizable decides that the police haven't been doing anything, and so she needs to do something herself. She rents three billboards that call out the sheriff by name and then ask why he hasn't arrested anyone yet. It's an outstanding political move, but it quickly makes her an enemy of the people, as folks in Ebbing, Missouri side with the sheriff, begin to feel sorry for him, accuse this woman of hating the police, etc. People get distracted. They terrorize her; they shun her kid at school; they try destroy the billboards. The billboards rightly call out law enforcement for not having done their jobs, but people are more interested in accusing the woman of hating the police.

All I could think of for the entire movie was the Colin Kaepernick protests about the deaths of black men at the hands of police in the United States. Kaepernick kneels. He asks us to do something about the police killing unarmed black men. He attempts to call attention to something that is a real problem in the United States, a problem that has real, life-and-death consequences. ... And then all people want to talk about is the way he "disrespects" the United States flag. Right? Like, it is so difficult to talk about the issue of police killing unarmed black men and boys that we can't bear to talk about it, so instead we shift the discussion to "respect" for the stars and stripes. And I hear people say Well, he should have protested a different way, and all I can think is Well, we should stop supporting police who kill people, but I guess some folks think one problem is more important than the other.

This is how I understood the entirety of Three Billboards: as a lengthy meditation on Kaepernick and the hostility shown toward him and others who decided to kneel during the U.S. national anthem. (The outrage over this actually caught me a little off guard. I really don't understand why people are/were so angry at him.) What happens in Three Billboards is that people are in such a habit of siding with police, so invested in the pretense that "law and order" is functioning well in this country, that they are willing to support police officers who torture those they incarcerate and willing to turn against those who demonstrate that law and order isn't actually working the way that it should. The people in the film hate that someone is calling bullshit on law enforcement so they attack the person who is yelling bullshit instead of attacking the problem she is attempting to describe. For me, this aspect of the film works superbly, and I loved this part of it.

I recently read a piece arguing that Three Billboards is not smart about race. I suppose I don't really disagree. The movie's use of racial slurs for comedic purposes are typically McDonagh, and if they work in the UK context, they seemed stupid to me. But the piece also (intriguingly) makes the claim that the movie didn't need to be about race in the first place, arguing that McDonagh should just have left race out of his film, since his film isn't about race.  

Isn't about race? I submit that if a film is about prison or the police or the criminal justice system in the United States, then it is definitely a film about racism, even if it doesn't want to be.

Three Billboards is an uneven film. It tries to combine sentimentality, comedy, and a clever plot. But it can't really manage this combination. It simply isn't savage enough. There are long sequences where the film asks us to feel sorry for the policemen it criticizes – not in a serious way, but in a shallow oh-it's-hard-for-them-too kind of way – and these don't work. They made me want to check my watch and return to the main storyline. And McDonagh dwells in these areas for far longer even than make narrative sense.

When we left the theatre, Alexandrew, my companion, offered that (although he hated to say it) the movie would have been directed better by Tarantino. I have to (but not as reluctantly as Alex) agree. McDonagh wants to have sentimentality and brutality and comedy. We are supposed to say awwww when Frances McDormand doesn't want to have sex with Peter Dinklage, when Woody Harrelson writes a sappy letter to his wife, when we learn more about Sam Rockwell. But all of this sentimentality is awkward. It gets in the way of the film's real social analysis. It moves the film into cheap territory and away from the real thinking that I think Three Billboards had the potential to inspire.

The Lobster

So far, The Lobster is one of my favorite films of the year. Seeing as how it was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, you can bet that it is set in a bizarre world where things are not like our own... or, well, they are like and unlike our own world. The reason The Lobster works so damn well is that one is continually reminded that, actually, this world that seems so bizarre, inhabited by people who don't make the decisions we would make (or do they?) is actually more like our own world than we would care to admit. This makes The Lobster into a hilarious movie, of course. There is a ton of awkwardness; characters make bizarre leaps that we cannot imagine making ourselves; but then there is the way it reflects reality, which is disconcerting to say the least. For all its weirdness, The Lobster hits close to home.
The reason

This is a smart and terrifying and sort of perfect film, in its own way. The Lobster is a challenging watch, though, for anyone who isn't down with Lanthimos's particular vision. I saw it with an older, bourgeois audience at the opening night of the Florida Film Festival, and the discomfort in the audience was palpable. Chatting with people the next day, I found that a good number of people didn't like the film nearly as much as I did. Too each her own. I like a film that is willing to unsettle.

There are a couple more things worth remarking:

1) We've all been waiting for people to discover just how brilliant Colin Farrel is. I don't really think The Lobster will change everyone's mind about him, but I sure wish it would. His work here is just superb.

2) This is not a science-fiction film. The characters live in some kind of dystopia or alternate universe, but again it really isn't so different from our own world – an exaggeration, no more.

Just a couple of awkward guys tryin' to get dates.

3) What Lanthimos does so brilliantly in The Lobster is separate between comedy and violence. This is something that a filmmaker like Martin or John Michael McDonagh does so poorly, but Lanthimos does it perfectly. When The Lobster wants to be absurd, when it is interested in making fun of the society it is portraying, it sets the tone so that that can happen (even my awkward audience at the FFF laughed when they were supposed to do so). But when the film turns violent, there is no laughter. And The Lobster doesn't simply change from laughs to violence, it alternates between the two at a terrifying pace. It is to Lanthimos's credit that these shifts between terror and hilarity are executed perfectly.

4) If you liked or were fascinated by Lanthimos's previous (Academy-Award-nominated) film Dogtooth, I'm here to tell you that The Lobster is even better. Get ready.

There is actually quite a good deal more to say, but I don't think I want to do a reading of The Lobster, at least not yet. I'd rather wait until more people have seen it and have thoughts on this strange, intriguing film.

Catching up on More 2014 Films

Like Father, Like Son (そして父になる) is Hirokuza Kore-eda's exploration of childhood, genetics, parenthood, and the big nature/culture discussion that we always have. Like Father, Like Son poses the question: What do you do if you find that your six-year-old son, whom you love more than anything, was switched at birth with another boy? If the other family agrees, do you switch them back so that you can begin raising the son that is genetically yours? What if – and this is where Hirokuza's film gets really brilliant – you have always wished that your son could be braver, stronger, smarter, and now you feel like this is an explanation for your son's failings?

Hirokuza's film is a Japanese movie, so it isn't filled with histrionic scenes and yelling and fistfights between the two fathers. And the dynamics of raising in children in Japan and raising children in the U.S. are (obviously) slightly different, as well, but Like Father, Like Son gets at the real heart of the matter. Hirokuza slowly complicates things until they are as difficult as you can imagine them being. (Rather like a Asghar Farhadi film, without the tragedy.) By the time we reached the third act, I cared for these people so much that I was emotional about any decision they might have made. This is a superb film, with excellent performances, especially from the lead actor, Masaharu Fukuyama. The performances of the children are also beautiful, their wide-eyed confusion works as a mirror for the alleged knowledge that the experts, the parents, and the audience are supposed to possess. Be sure to see Like Father, Like Son before you see whatever USAmerican remake that (you can be sure) they are cooking up.

I hated Calvary, John Michael McDonagh's (alleged) comedy about an Irish priest who is threatened with death during confession and then given a week to get his affairs in order. The film stars a bevy of excellent actors, including Brendan Gleeson, Isaach de Bankolé, M. Emmet Walsh, Aiden Gillen, Domhnall Gleeson, Chris O'Dowd, and Kelly Reilly. (Killian Scott gave my favorite performance in the film, for the record.) I've been told, too, that the film makes more sense if I've seen JMMcD's earlier film The Guard and perhaps a television show or short film of his? Whatever they are, I missed them, and apparently missed the point of this film as well.

Films about religion have never been very interesting to me, in truth, and Calvary is about the way that the Catholic church, once so important to Irish nationhood and Irish daily life, has faded in importance, rejected by the people it was intended to serve. The church, too, has been guilty of horrible crimes, not just over the centuries, but in our own century, and so the film is about parishoners and their complicated relationship with their local priest. The thing is, the film is not funny, and is not intended to be. Amusing or quirky scenes between the priest and the parishoners are broken up by gratuitous helicopter shots of Irish hills and these are overlaid with slow, operatic (or more specifically) sacred music. This slows the film down considerably, and gives it a ponderous mood.

Even more vexed is Calvary's use of violence. John Michael McDonagh is the brother to the writer/director Martin McDonagh, who has written hyperviolent plays such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore and A Behanding in Spokane. His films include In Bruges. Now, I will admit to never truly understanding McDonagh's approach to violence. Why is this supposed to be funny? Do you enjoy the violence? Are you interested in pain? Are you making a statement about it? His work always makes me ask these questions, not least because violence is treated in a cavalier way. To give just one example, in In Bruges, a body falls from a high tower and lands with a crunch and a splash on the cobblestones of Belgium. The effect is decidedly comic. Why? With McDonagh, his fascination with the flesh-ness of the human body, its fragility, always seems to be what he's exploring – an intriguing exploration, to be sure – but his point of view about this always seems to be silly. Isn't it funny that we're just, after all, meat – with bones that go crunch when you smack 'em? I'm mostly alone here, of course: McDonagh's work is very popular.

But his brother John Michael McDonagh takes even more pleasure in the violence he shows us. His camera positively enjoys watching suffering, and he asks us to enjoy it, too. He slows down one particular sequence so that we can, Tarantino-like, watch a bullet rip through a man's head in slow-motion and spatter blood across a beach. Why? The effect is cruel and grotesque, and this clashes markedly with the emotional valence the scene appears to be trying to achieve. Calvary is, honestly, a total mess, and I had begun to hate it long before the slow-motion bullet.

...And then there's Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (설국열차). We're on a train. In the future. We need to fight the bad guys. And we need to get to the front of the train. The whole thing is as simple as that – at least to begin with. Now this is a violent movie that has no pretentions about how its violence works. This is an action film about meat, about bodies crunching against metal, about weakness and fear and real pain. But these are Bong's acknowledged subjects. That is, Snowpiercer is a movie about who gets to live and who gets to die, and the different types of violence that attend decisions about who lives and who dies. And this exploration all takes place on a train that is speeding through a frozen wasteland.

Snowpiercer stars Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, and Octavia Spencer. And it is fun (at least it was for me) from start to finish. In fact, I think the movie is worth seeing simply for the art direction – the train cars are crafted beautifully, and they are so different from one another, and so cleverly arranged, that the simple walk from the back of the train to the front, through the world of the cars, is fascinating. And Tilda! Tilda is ridiculous and so much fun. (Hilarious that she and John Hurt were also both in the ponderously boring Only Lovers Left Alive in such a different style.) I do wish Chris Evans were a better actor. His range strikes me as fairly limited. I think he's a really fun performer, but there's an act three monologue in the film that (aside from interrupting the action-packed thrust of the film) really doesn't achieve what it ought to because Evans can't really connect emotionally with what he's saying. A more actor-focused director may be able to solve this problem for him, eventually. I will hope so, because I like him.

I should note that I thought that Snowpiercer was totally incoherent, and the presence of the writer was so palpable that by the end I felt that literally anything could've happened and then been explained away by some trick. The film's ending didn't make one bit of sense to me. (There's an explosion and there's a polar bear: I have no idea.) And I didn't care about any of that. This is a brutal, violent, fun ride, filled with the awesome fight sequences and suspense we have come to expect from the new wave of Korean directors. I really, really liked it. But don't spend too much time thinking about it.