Reviews: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Breathe
Three Billboards is a big achievement, boasting top stars and an intricately skilful screenplay.
Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) is angry. It has been months since her teenage daughter, Angie, was raped, murdered and set on fire as she walked home late one night on the outskirts of Ebbing, and the police seem to have made no progress whatsoever in finding the killer.
Mildred blames police chief William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for spending more time “torturing black folks” than investigating her daughter’s death, and to make her point she rents three unused billboards located on a minor road on the edge of town to advertise her cause with signs that read: “Still No Arrests?”, “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” and “Raped While Dying”.
The third film directed by playwright Martin McDonagh, after In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a considerable achievement. It boasts one of the most intricately skilful screenplays used as the basis for an American film in quite some time, a script that shifts in a nanosecond from the bleakly funny to the deeply confronting, from the raw to the sublime.
McDonagh wrote the role of Mildred with McDormand in mind, and it’s the best thing she has done since Fargo. What makes the film so interesting is that the crusading Mildred is so obsessed with her self-appointed role to bring the killer(s) of her daughter to justice that she has become completely blinkered; nothing will stop her crusade, not even common sense. She also feels guilty because she’d refused to lend Angie her car on that fateful night.
Her billboard provocations throw the small town into turmoil. Willoughby, who appears to be a genuinely decent family man with a wife (Abbie Cornish) and two little girls, tries to assure Mildred that he’s working on her daughter’s case, but the lady’s not for turning. Then he tells her he has terminal cancer, but that doesn’t affect her either, except to remark that the billboards won’t be as effective after he’s dead.
His flaky deputy, Dixon — the magnificent Sam Rockwell — channels his anger towards Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the hapless character who rented the space to Mildred in the first place, and by and large the locals side with Willoughby.
Mildred’s son Robbie (Lucas Hedges, so good in Manchester by the Sea) is conflicted and the local priest drops by to urge Mildred to give up on her campaign, only to be bitterly accused, by association, of complicity with pedophile priests (a scene that palpably chilled the audience at the film’s Venice premiere before a burst of spontaneous applause). Also outraged by Mildred’s crusade is her ex-husband, Charlie (John Hawkes), who — in one hilarious scene — happens to be at the same restaurant where Mildred is having an awkward date with James (Peter Dinklage); Charlie is accompanied by his 19-year-old girlfriend Penelope (Australian Samara Weaving), whose beauty is offset by her low IQ (she confuses “polo” with “polio”).
These are all wonderfully written and acted roles, but perhaps the best of all the film’s marginal characters is that of deputy Dixon’s mother (Sandy Martin), an amazing old dame whose influence on her son obviously has been considerable and not exactly positive.
There is, as you can see, a great deal going on in the film. At the start it feels like the basis for a straightforward thriller: who killed Angie and will her mother succeed in tracking down the killer with or without the help of the authorities? But it’s much, much more than that.
The film’s savage humour, embodied in McDormand’s remarkable portrayal of a woman who has reached a point where she’s hardly rational any more, is suffused with elements of what can be described only as poetry, embodied in the scene in which Mildred, while checking out the billboards, is joined by a deer that emerges from the forest — Angie reincarnated? Haunting, too, is the use of the plaintive Celtic ballad The Last Rose of Summer on the soundtrack.
The character of Willoughby, beautifully played by Harrelson, and the choices he makes also take the film way beyond the confines of the thriller format. Notable, too, is Rockwell’s gormless, mother-fixated Dixon. In fact just about every actor in the film is at the top of their game inspired, no doubt, by McDonagh’s superb screenplay (which won a prize in Venice) and by the originality, at times the sheer brilliance of the entire concept.
***
Andy Serkis is best known for his contributions to characters such as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films or the ape Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise. His first film as director, Breathe, is based on the true story of polio victim Robin Cavendish, whose son, Jonathan, is one of the movie’s producers.
It’s the mid-1950s, and Robin (Andrew Garfield), a tea broker based in Kenya, meets Diana (Claire Foy) during a cricket match in rural England. They fall in love, marry and travel to Africa, shrugging off the then-serious Mau Mau terrorist threat. Their marriage seems idyllic but, soon after Diana becomes pregnant in 1958, Robin is paralysed by polio.
Considered opinion at the time was that polio victims as extremely affected as Robin could not survive. Attached to an iron lung, and able to move only his head, he’s shipped home to England to die and spends many weeks in a hospital with other polio victims. “Those who God loves most he allows to suffer most,” is the fatuous message of comfort offered by a priest.
But Diana’s courage and loyalty, and Robin’s many friends, eventually result in a solution and the “invention” of a makeshift portable breathing apparatus.
This potentially grim story follows other successful films about men (it’s always men) with disabilities such as My Left Foot, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Theory of Everything, and while it may not be quite in the same class as these it certainly provides inspirational material.
Garfield makes the most of his obviously restricted role, but it’s Foy who steals the film as Diana, who is first seen as a rather snobbish English socialite but who gradually reveals hitherto unexpected reserves of grit to become her husband’s salvation. On the other hand, Jonathan Hyde rather overdoes the pompousness of an establishment doctor who has little sympathy for people he dismisses as amateurs trying to help Robin.
In a couple of scenes Serkis racks up the tension as Robin faces a crisis of one sort or another. His dog accidentally unplugs the power fuelling the iron lung (will Diana notice in time?) and on a rather ambitious road trip to Spain there’s another crisis.
As a director Serkis, on the strength of this film, seems to be capable and efficient but not in any way visionary. Robin’s story is certainly a tale of near-triumph over adversity, and the director manages to keep cheap sentimentality at bay. In many ways this is a very English story about intestinal fortitude and the stiff upper lip.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (MA15+)
National release from January 1
4 stars
Breathe (M)
National release
3.5 stars