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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