Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2018)

Okay, let’s do this.

I can’t give Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri a star rating. It exists in a realm of moral ambiguity tantamount to Schrödinger-esque quantum mechanics, as it champions disobedience on part of a citizen against a corrupt and violent police force, whilst doing no more than at best paying lip-service to the people of colour who come most in contact with police violence and at worst trying to salvage the worst offenders for a white perspective.

Three Billboards is, absolutely, exceptionally powerful in places. Repeated use of the phrase “Raped While Dying” sends emotional shockwaves, as it should. But, in a way, it’s also the problem. Mainstream Hollywood “issue films” are exceptionally wont to render questions of social justice and civil rights as wholly affect, no effect. In other words, there is no legitimate material analysis of the situation, which means that, when Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) storms over to Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) and inquires after the “[n-word]-torturing business,” it is very difficult indeed to believe she would have nearly as much a problem with the cops torturing “[n-words]” if they’d also managed to find her daughter’s killer.

This is largely because the suffering of people of colour at the hands of the police is never more than a (white) talking point, and a passing one at that: we’re told Dixon tortured a Black man pretty horrifically at some point before the film, but we never see him, we never hear his name. It’s nothing but a narrative device to help illustrate a white character. Mildred’s boss, Denise (Amanda Warren) is barely afforded a few “you go, girl”-s to Mildred before she is incarcerated for – you guessed it – possession in order to – guessed it again – get at Mildred. We’ve already had it established that the department holding Denise is in the business of torturing Black people so, will the camera cut to her, to see if she’s okay? No, we don’t know how she’s doing; we’re actually supposed to forget about her, but you bet your bottom dollar Mildred expresses her outrage all around the station. Might have been nice to visit her in jail even once, but we’ve got a one-woman war to wage, I guess.

Interestingly for a film whose plot is catalysed by the rape and murder of a teenage girl, Three Billboards actually takes an exceptionally dim view of all young women. Not one is portrayed as anything other than a ditzy, well-meaning but undeniably stupid girlfriend. Even the flashbacks of Mildred’s daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton), show her to be irrationally volatile in such a way that her death is portrayed by implication as a – no matter how unjust – punishment for storming out the house.

Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) takes on an effectively messianic role throughout the film: a Good Cop™ who knows all our hearts’ desires, but not who killed Angela, it is he who promulgates Dixon’s supposed rehabilitation, informing him he has “love in [his] heart,” an insight that has escaped everyone else, audience included. Dixon takes it upon himself then to improve his actions, after having been fired for beating and throwing someone out a first floor window into traffic. Not arrested. Fired. He betters his ways through interactions solely with – yep – white people. Dixon’s increased importance as the film goes on shows him to be the avatar for any Trump voter in the seats, and the message Martin McDonagh wishes to convey is clearly one of largely liberal platitudes. “Hurt people hurt people” shouldn’t be such a stunning revelation to all the critics falling over themselves to give Three Billboards 5 stars for its “nuance,” and yet it seems to be its rallying cry. Unlearning oppressive thought and behaviour is acknowledged as uncomfortable, through its insistence on showing graphically the pain Dixon experiences in the second half of the film (in contrast to almost any of the pain experienced by his victims), but it gets so wrapped up in showing the discomfort, it forgets to show any unlearning.

The film had me laughing and tearing up in the grand majority of the right places, it’s nothing at all if not compelling, and the performances are fantastic. I’m especially glad to see the brilliant Caleb Landry Jones slowly climb the ladder, from first seeing him in The Last Exorcism, then Get Out and now to Three Billboards. Frances McDormand’s Best Actress Oscar will be well deserved. The film is, in occasional parts, beautiful, both visually and emotionally. However, there is an inconsistency and two-facednedness which is both ethically and morally suspect that it falls again into what may count either as tone-deafness, or indeed flat-out cynicism, which makes me want to avoid praising it too much at all. Its disquieting ambiguity is what I’m sure may have put Peter Dinklage in the first role I’ve seen him take in years that struck me as – for my perhaps patronising, able-bodied money – demeaning. The moment climaxes are reached, guns are drawn or buildings burned, Three Billboards has shifted out of clumsily handled dramatic thinkpiece territory and into “Martin McDonagh, director of Seven Psychopaths,” Tarantino-lite genre film territory, and the transition is not nearly as smooth as everyone involved clearly thinks it is.

McDormand is a powerhouse, and I’m not saying this would have solved every problem, but imagine if Mildred Hayes had been played by Angela Bassett. Same age, same wonderful talent and ability to combine comedy, aggression and heart, but one can only imagine how much the film would have been improved if the violence and indifference of the police expressed to Black people in the South had been the crux of the story, not anecdotal reference material. If murder that inspires all actions in the film had not been of the Young White Woman, the victim supposed to inspire sympathy, but had been someone as likely to be murdered by the cops as by any criminal. This is why #OscarsSoWhite should have been treated as a blessing for Hollywood – the overrepresentation of whiteness in films isn’t just a travesty of social justice; it stops cinema from being all it could be, too.

mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

I don’t really like Darren Aronofsky. Requiem For a Dream is a bad and manipulative film that doesn’t represent any aspect of the phenomenology of addiction well in the slightest, Black Swan is just… awful. The Wrestler is good, but that’s almost entirely based on its performances. So I was surprised to walk out of mother! thinking to myself “that was…pretty good!”

I went into the screening as cold as possible and I want to afford that same ability to readers who have not yet seen mother! so I’ll keep things vague as possible and avoid a synopsis and just dive right in.

Perhaps the most chronologically theological aspect of mother!is not the litany of (one might suggest rather too) legible parallels to some of the Bible’s greatest hits. Rather, it is the fact that, when we begin, we are continuously offended by His words and actions, but soon enough find ourselves increasingly offended, as the film progresses, by His passivity, His silence, and His absence. Indeed, when The Shit Starts Going Down, despite the fact it’s supposedly all for Him, He is largely nowhere to be found. This is not an accident, but a decidedly conscious, and surprisingly balanced, perspective on God’s place within religious violence: it is not His doing, and he cannot necessarily help how people respond to His works, but its continuation is His inaction and for that He can be blamed.

Is mother! a subtle film? No. Aronofsky is not a subtle man. Is mother! a clever film? Also no; he’s not much of a clever man, either. mother!‘s philosophy is ultimately entirely stunted by the fact it appeals to the affective horror of anthropocentrism via the means of anthropomorphism and, consequently, can only display its disgust at humanity by rendering Mother Earth human. Intellectually speaking, this is a fairly unforgivable gaffe that cannot help but hollow the foundation of the film’s premise, to an extent that many critics have ended up taking a surprisingly literal interpretation of the film. In which case, one may consider mother! to be a welcome take on heterosexual age-gap relationships which would never normally raise an eyebrow in any other Hollywood film. Trouble for certain other, more negative, reviews is: Lawrence and Aronofsky have a real-life relationship of exactly the same difference as she and Bardem. Trouble for me is: Javier Bardem is ridiculously hot and, even if I had a problem with age-gaps (which I don’t), I would put pretty much every principle on hold were he a legitimate candidate for my affections. Honestly, though, I think it’s pretty rich for right-on discourse lovers who preach constantly about “self-crit” to then turn around and sneer at what one might well consider to be self-crit in action.
The framing, composition, camera work, acting and editing manage to achieve effects that would typically be considered mutually exclusive: mother! comes across as finely tuned yet campy, nasty yet affecting, jagged yet smooth. Certainly there are nods to Aronofsky’s precious efforts: the giallo-deferent glamorous archetypal villainy of Black Swan, the pseudo-documentarian camera style of The Wrestler, obviously the Genesis meditation of Noah, but perhaps most strikingly the swift subjective-universal (there’s those oxymorons again) degeneration of Requiem For a Dream. And yet, it still feels new. Well, it feels new for Aronofsky; not for cinema. The swift degeneration makes me want to compare it favourably to High-Rise though, yet again, I am reminded of We are the Flesh and its absolute brilliance. The most affective personal and successful theological aspects make me want to watch it as the middle film in a triple film, following Queen of Earth and preceding Hard to Be a God, though I feel like that might only reveal mother!‘s flaws all the more starkly. Nevertheless, it’s pleasant to come out of a film by such a crushingly basic-ass underarm-serving chin-stroker as Aronofsky and think that he may have actually made something interesting for once in his damn life.

 

⭐⭐⭐1/2

Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé, 2014)

A film I feel like I’ve seen a million times at this stage due to my usually reliably lesbian best friend’s obsession with both Colin Firth and Mark Strong, Before I Go to Sleep combines the Memento premise of reoccurring short-term-memory loss, the “is my partner secretly a psychopath?” trope of Suspicion, and the “spooky hotel corridor” visions of The Shining, but with a dispassionate Britishness of sensibility that produces the psychological thriller equivalent of a soggy, grey-skied afternoon.

Goodness knows, the London-based melodramatic kitchen sink thriller (surely there must be a potential abbreviation in there somewhere?) needn’t be nothingy – I mean, I’m hardly in love withNotes On a Scandal, but it was at least pretty meaty in terms of character development and interaction, cause and effect. The problem in Before I Go to Sleep may lie in its presentation of Christine (Nicole Kidman)’s anterograde amnesia: by having her memory reset to a time long before the incident that caused her brain damage, every time she goes to bed, her personality itself becomes essentially a blank slate each day. Now, that’s actually a pretty good set up, but only when either the writer is skilled enough to establish and re-establish interpersonal relations between characters both efficiently and meaningfully, or at the very least the actor gives a strong enough performance to tease out said emotional veracity which, unsurprisingly, Nicole Kidman as ever fails to do. Thus, most conversations in Before I Go to Sleepessentially translate to:

“Agh! Who are you?”
“I’m X, you can trust me, honest…”
“Oh… ‘kay.”

The absence of personality in Christine, not to mention the absence of charisma in Kidman, leaves Colin Firth’s suspicious husband character as the character most worthy of our interest though, even then, the dialogue never really takes off: “Christine, you’re 40,” he tells her as the film starts, in a tone of voice that implies she just walked into the room in fishnets and a miniskirt. Mark Strong’s dashing doctor character is yet another phone-in who never manages to raise tension – of dread or sexuality – high enough to have any particular impact on the plot. Thus, when The Revelation finally occurs, the audience can essentially rest easy that the mystery is over, but sigh deeply for the film isn’t yet.

**

The Human Stain (Robert Benton, 2003)

 

My stance with the obnoxious whiners, both the ones for and against what is so often frankly mislabeled “political correctness” ever in flux, my opinion on The Human Stain‘s own argument is not unlike the opening joke of Annie Hall about two elderly Jewish ladies complaining about the awful food, and in such small portions: it is all at once desperately stupid, and isn’t made at all strongly enough.

It is almost universally acknowledged that Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman are woefully miscast in this film. I mean, obviously, Nicole Kidman, a nigh-perpetual charisma vacuum, appears miscast in pretty much everything but the casting of protagonist Coleman Silk is at least slightly interesting, if still pretty lousy. Better qualified and more dedicated people than me could explore the potential racial-identity-oriented implications of having the young Coleman Silk played by a man of Afro-Carribean and Jewish descent (Wentworth Miller), and the old Coleman Silk being played by a man with neither, with regard to Silk’s choices regarding his familial and racial disconnection, but I don’t feel all that comfortable exploring it right now, myself. What I shall instead say is that, despite my general lack of interest in Miller, I think he does a pretty fine job, all things considered, both of portraying Silk on his own terms and also reflecting Hopkins’ mannerisms enough to make one a believable younger version of the other. However, this only further establishes something of a star-power-dynamic, as the latter’s performance is a wholly workaday Hopkins-as-Hopkins which, especially in the context of the May-December relationship between Silk and Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), makes The Human Stain appear an overly-serious dummy-run for the equally underwhelming Allen comedy You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

The catalyst for the lacklustre narrative, Silk’s loss of his academic post on account of his use of the term “spooks,” meaning “ghosts,” being seemingly intentionally misconstrued as “spooks,” meaning “Black people,” is wholly dependent not on the clandestine racial origins of the speaker, but the lack of level-headedness of his colleagues, given the clarity of context of the word, situated in the phrase “do they exist, or are they spooks?” This is ever so slightly alluded to, right near the very of the film which, given what’s just happened at the climax, everyone essentially goes – “who cares?” However, the bulk of the film is essentially predicated on a deeply inane “freezepeach” babble: “What do you mean I can’t use a racial slur? What if I’m secretly Black? Didn’t think of THAT one, didya?” An argument made predominantly by the whitest of white men.

Nicole Kidman is, of course, awful but, to be fair, so is her character. The Wentworth Miller-led flashback sections are, without a doubt, the most engaging, but are entirely cheapened and embittered by the fact that what is actually a fairly compelling story of one man is being used, inappropriately and poorly, as smoke-and-mirrors for a completely fatuous argument. The tensions surrounding Faunia and her obnoxious PTSD outbursts, one-dimensional allusions to childhood molestation, dead children, and her not-at-all-menacing menacing ex husband (Ed Harris), beyond being dull and grating, also distract from the point the story is trying to make. The result is, rather than complexity, The Human Stain merely gains confusion.

The Human Stain suffers through its underuse of good actors in good roles, overuse of good actors in bad roles, and overuse of bad actors in bad roles, never with enough conviction or narrative drive to express its point to the extent that it could be described as a “commentary” or “satire,” and it’s a stupid point anyway.

 

*1/2

The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011)

Retrospectively, it’s pretty much impossible not to look at The Ides of March and not see it as existing almost purely as the personification of the gestative period between two crucial political thrillers: Michael Clayton and House of Cards. However, whilst both Clayton and Cards stand as testament to the fact that thrillers made of 90% conversation and a maximum of 10% murder can, through artful use of cynicism, irony, misdirection and deception, still turn the dial up to 11, Ides of March never really goes far above a middling 5 or 6.

Clooney’s direction is competent if uncharismatic, and the editing’s looseness does little to dissuade the typical parodic critiques of Gosling’s dispassionate performance. However, the capital-A Acting is without a doubt as consistently impressive as you would expect from a line-up of Clooney, Gosling, Seymour Hoffman, Tomei and Giamatti, with Rachel Wood very much holding her own. Still, the characters all feel too archetypal for the cast to find anything particularly new or interesting to, other than be good on the back of their talent alone. Combine this with a story that never really has anyone acting comparatively that badly, nor the repercussions (save for one character, whose fate is written on their forehead from the get-go) that punishing, and you soon see that the stakes just plain aren’t high enough to demand any serious attention be paid to it. No matter how well acted it may be, a House of Cards with its teeth removed is, at the end of the day, just a lot of grey.

 

**

 

Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011)

Every time the LGBT+ film festivals come around, I tend to give something of a groan. Sure, there’s the occasional Tangerine, the occasional Tropical Malady, but the grand majority are always mumblecore-esque coming-of-age romantic drama snoozefests. So, I hadn’t really be in much of a hurry to check out Pariah – a coming-of-age (semi)-romantic drama – any time soon.

Pariah‘s story assuredly does not take us anywhere new: the same largely-uninitiated protagonist finding her feet, the same outgoing best friend who’s more interwoven with the community but is on a lower rung of society, the same repressive, shouty mother, the same kid sister, the same creative outlet, the same supportive teacher etc. However, adherence to generic conventions only limits a film’s originality on the level of narrative; Pariah still manages to win on all other counts. Indeed, I would have described any other film with so much that we have seen so many times before as cliché; thus Pariah existing in my mind as simply “a bit tropey” is, frankly, a feat in and of itself.

Pariah‘s highest achievement is assuredly its deft creation of a believable universe, using Brooklyn’s geography as a referential chart for the emotional topography, traversed by so many characters that, even when some of the younger stars’ acting is a little – and, I do stress, a little – patchy in places, all the other formal elements of Pariah align to bolster the actors into a compelling and distinctly real performance. That said, on a wider level, I can’t help but feel somewhat irked by the film’s promotion of an already very much extant suspicion of bisexual/non-monosexual queer orientation.

Pariah is by no stretch of the imagination a game-changer, but its mixture of attractive cinematography, uniformly impressive performances, great soundtrack and, yes, elevation of a young Black queer experience helps it play the game awfully well.

 

****

The Scapegoat (Robert Hamer, 1959)

A compelling and enjoyable little film, with solid performances all-round, The Scapegoat is one of myriad stories about doppelgängers switching roles, from The Prince and the Pauper through to Dave and beyond. However, The Scapegoat kicks off with a little more of a North By Northwest vibe, as depressed provincial university professor John Barratt (Alex Guinness) is constantly taken for Jacques de Gué (also Guinness), despite all protestation, following being drugged by Jacques and left with his familial and financial responsibilities, including an alienated wife, a daughter who threatens to self-defenestrate simply to start a conversation, an invalid morphine addict of a mother (Bette Davis), and an amorous Italian mistress.

Not simply for Alec Guinness in multiple roles did I however feel a startling connection to Kind Hearts and Coronets, so I’m completely unsurprised to discover this film is in fact a Robert Hamer film. Sadly, I am also unsurprised to discover this was his penultimate, and last film he completed (being sacked during School For Scoundrels‘ production) due to his alcoholism being in full swing, Wikipedia informing me Guinness himself having to take on directorial duties when Hamer was too inebriated.

I wouldn’t call The Scapegoat‘s direction necessarily lacklustre, but it is certainly – and unsurprisingly – non-committal. There is at least one strong narrative turn that demands considerably more suspense than it receives, and an ending which should address a startling ambiguity and conflict of interests, but casually glides over them to make the viewer somewhat unsatisfied, rather than on the tenterhooks I believe they should be. Instead, The Scapegoat is left largely at a point of pleasant viewing, simply because the majority of the story is, well, pleasant: John does a very impressive job of settling into his new life, as long as you ignore all the plot holes – as you are encouraged too. Ignoring the big one at the end, how is he going to continue supplying his mother with illicit morphine, without Jacques’ presumably Parisian connections?

Thus, The Scapegoat is absolutely fine in an afternoon-viewing sort of way but, with Hitchcock at the helm, or even just a sober Hamer, this might have been elevated to something much more memorable.

 

***

Miss Violence (Alexandros Avranas, 2013)

A gruelling, claustrophobic and bleak document of sexual violence and domination amongst the Greek petit-bourgeois in the face of the recession, Miss Violence can most easily be summarised as “Dogtooth without the existential comedy.” This acts both as a positive and a negative for the film: on the one hand, this leaves the spectator with nothing to protect them from the grim reality of the action onscreen; on the other, it does place a great onus on the content’s ability to affect the spectator as the main engine for the film’s narrative. Personally, I struggle to imagine anyone who wouldn’t be affected by the content and, thus, the film certainly works. However, the way it is portrayed as something of a “reveal” in the final act is a bit of a stumper, given that I can’t imagine there’s any doubt in anyone’s mind as to what’s been going on up until then. The grim ambiguity of the ending does work entirely in the film’s favour though and I imagine I shall, at some point, watch it again, though I’m not entirely sure for what purpose when I do prefer Dogtooth.

***1/2