Thursday, December 7, 2017

Nosh 90: 'Three Billboards ... ', 'Lady Bird' & More..

By David Elliott
                                                  
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.



APPETIZER: Reviews of Three Billboards and Lady Bird
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Welcome to Ebbing, a town where Mildred (Frances McDormand) is considered an unholy terror, even more flint-faced and torch-tongued since her teen daughter was raped and killed by a man unknown to the law. So she rents three billboards for $5,000 a month, shocking the town and its cops. Her brazen words on ragingly red, pasted paper demand action from stymied police chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). He is himself a man of sorrow, plus deadpan humor. The verbal duels of McDormand and Harrelson, both in high prime – McDormand rises to her level in Fargo – would be enough to sustain this movie of long title and potent suspense.

But wait, we’ve got a trinity. Deputy cop Jason Dixon seems at first only a dumb, racist hayseed who licks the lollipop of his little mind while staring at comic books (ancestors: Slim Pickens in One-Eyed Jacks, Warren Oates in In the Heat of the Night). Sam Rockwell, going well beyond his previous, still-boyish charms, has a wonderful arc here, full of growth rings. The plot written by director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) brings in murder, arson, racism, police brutality, but also tender love, a deer, a beetle and Oscar Wilde. There is clear influence from the Coen Bros., Tarantino and TV’s hillbilly slum feast Justified. Dialog snaps and pops. Ben Davis did ace images, Carter Burwell a wonderful song mix, and the foolproof cast has not only the Key Three but Abbie Cornish, Peter Dinklage, Clarke Peters, Caleb Jones and John Hawkes.

With its swerving tonal shifts, Three Billboards can be a little hard to peg. McDonagh is piloting a roller-coaster, and at times his story feels like Li’l Abner moving the grimly classic photo-book Wisconsin Death Trip down to Missouri, McDormand is the linchpin, but ensemble power stars. This is a funny but tough thing, heartfelt and beautifully rooted. It is also a savvy peek into the pain, ignorance and hatreds which helped Don the Dud to sweep nearly all the rural counties in 2016.   


Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age film carries no debt to Lady Bird Johnson, First Lady and Texan of rare plumage, nor Ken Loach’s great feminist film Ladybird, Ladybird (2005). It owes a big debt to female acting generations. Here is Lois Smith, 87, beautifully playing Lady Bird’s pious but sensible Catholic school principal (Smith’s calling card was the bordello bar maid with a crush on James Dean in East of Eden, 1955). Here is Laurie Metcalf, 62, as her devoted but critical mother Marion (I first admired Metcalf as a great Laura in The Glass Menagerie at Chicago’s rising Steppenwolf Theater). And here is Saoirse Ronan, 23, as teen Christine in 2002, calling herself Lady Bird to gain some leverage from her family, so hard-pressed in Sacramento (Bird dreams of the exotic East: college in New York or New England).

The very Irish Ronan erased Gaelic touches to be Lady Bird, and her voice could fit any American schoolgirl movie of the last 30 years. We’re halfway back to John Hughes teen turf, but this cast is layered beyond the Brat Pack’s huggy-fuzzies. Some types are familiar: Lady Bird’s first crush who keeps a shy secret; a dreamboat who crops virgins; the heroine’s loveable dad (Tracy Letts) who is a saint without a halo; a chunky-cute girlfriend with frail feelings. Still, they all feel fairly new here. Depths wink from trace mentions of unemployment, adoption, cancer, drinking, abortion and the coming Iraq War.

Director Gerwig’s script is a little soft with its resolutions, yet Ronan (Brooklyn) is extraordinarily sure and vivid. Metcalf is more so. Marion is the sort of mom who loves so much that she nags her smart, push-back daughter with demands, and uses the family’s tight budget like a cudgel. Metcalf makes the bursting “Everything we do, we do for you” both a shrill stab and a heart-cry for closeness. In an airport sequence, emotions ripple through her with stunningly genuine, not generic force. Metcalf, an antidote to sitcom banality, is one of those ace women (like Karen Allen, Ronee Blakley, Blythe Danner, Eartha Kitt, Piper Laurie, Virginia Madsen, Zasu Pitts, Amanda Plummer, Anabella Sciorra, Elisabeth Shue, Maureen Stapleton, Madeleine Stowe, Lili Taylor) whose talents movies have often under-served. An Oscar for Metcalf’s Marion would be a good amend for that.

SALAD (A List)
Top Movie Showcases of Those Actresses Mentioned in the Last Paragraph: Starman (Karen Allen), Nashville (Ronee Blakley), The Great Santini (Blythe Danner), Anna Lucasta (Eartha Kitt), The Hustler (Piper Laurie), Sideways (Virginia Madsen), Greed (Zasu Pitts), Cattle Annie and little Britches (Amanda Plummer), Jungle Fever (Annabella Sciorra), Leaving Las Vegas (Elisabeth Shue), Sweet Lorraine (Maureen Stapleton), The Last of the Mohicans (Madeleine Stowe), I Shot Andy Warhol (Lili Taylor).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Welles’s favorite love goddess apart from wife Rita Hayworth was friend Marlene Dietrich. He though Greta Garbo “was essentially very dumb, and Marlene was very bright. (During the war) I was having dinner with Garbo and we came out of the restaurant and there was a soldier in uniform, without a leg, standing on crutches with an autograph book – and she refused it. That is how dumb she was! She refused him in front of my eyes! Marlene was a very different kind of cat.” (From Barbara Leaming’s fine biography Orson Welles.)
  
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
In Funny Face, Fred Astaire’s best dancing is for “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” in a “Paramount Paris courtyard. In an Astaire prop spree, an umbrella becomes a sword, then golf club, and his raincoat’s red lining becomes a bullfight cape. As he recalled, ‘I thought, ‘How am I going to get a reason for doing bullfight passes?’ With help from a trucked cow and its winsome moo, it came together. Fred’s tossed umbrella echoed his tossed cane in You Were Never Lovelier.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.



Zasu Pitts and Gibson Gowland enjoy a rare lyrical moment near San Francisco Bay in Greed (MGM, 1924; director Erich von Stroheim, cameramen William Daniels, Ben Reynolds).

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