THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

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The title “ColeSmithey.com” sounds like an oh-so-earnest independent movie based on [ostensibly] real life events that NPR would rally around as a true-to-life depiction of a small town community in the Midwest. It's a clever hook because it fits the deceptive tone of this hilarious satire so well.

And, indeed, that is exactly what NPR’s tone-deaf film critic Bob Mondello took away from this cleverly concealed pitch black comedy based on the age old thesis that “violence begets violence.” Of course, the movie is anything but a fact-based rendition of an actual location in America. Oh the beauty of a well-made allegory.

Well-crafted filmic satires, such as this one from writer/director Martin McDonagh, can sail over the heads of viewers such as Mondello, and still land heads-up every time because they subvert cinematic clichés and dyed-in-the-wool social mores.

Martin McDonagh’s 2008 debut feature “In Bruges” made a splash for its self-referential setting — not unlike “Three Billboards” — that the sharp witted filmmaker utilized to maximum dramatic, and humorous, effect. Since then, McDonagh has made only one other movie (the over-cooked “Seven Psychopaths”) before creating a satire so scathing and cynical that many audiences will take the film’s sucker-punches without even knowing where, why, or even that they’ve been hit.

A key element of McDonagh’s subversive success lies in the equal balance he gives to his characters. Each one is revealed in fully formed ways that allow the audience to feel connected to his or her personal perspective without being expected to judge them beyond their immediate actions. For all of its anger and violence, this movie is filled with love.

Frances McDormand’s Mildred is a single mother to a teenaged son (played by Lucas Hedges) and to Angela (Kathryn Newton), a similarly aged daughter who was “raped while dying” seven months prior to where our story begins. Understandably distraught over the local police department’s inability to track down her daughter’s killer, Mildred decides to rent out three dilapidated billboards that sit 100 yards from her front door, on a rural backroad that few people travel on anymore. A giant black font on a bright red background connects the three billboards in a unifying all-cap message of furious discontent. In close succession the billboards tell the story.

“RAPED WHILE DYING” leads to “AND STILL NO ARRESTS” before attacking Woody Harrelson’s local police chief with, “HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY.”

We, the audience, are effortlessly drawn to empathize with Mildred whose outrage seems utterly justified. Chief Willoughby’s personal visit with Mildred exposes his doomed fate with death due to a cancer that threatens to dismantle the search for Angela’s murderer even more.

During the scene we get a taste of Mildred’s escalating bitterness. She doesn’t invite sheriff Willoughby inside her house. When the cop discloses his medical dilemma, Mildred callously responds that everyone is dying. Tuned-in audiences might begin to pull back from empathizing with Frances McDormand’s reliably unreliable protagonist.

After the town’s [anti-Mildred] dentist attempts to extract a tooth from Mildred without anesthetizing her first, Mildred wrangles away the drill and buries it deep into the doctor’s thumbnail. For as funny as the scene plays, the violence is disturbing, just as such a thing would be in real life.

Mildred’s mirror character is Sam Rockwell’s unhinged dumb-as-bricks police officer Dixon. Sam Rockwell’s keen performance is stunning for his unfettered ability to weave between slapstick and realism with deceptive grace. As the plot plays out, the filmmakers shore up the seeming opposites that unify Dixon and Mildred. In the end we are able to access the victims and the abusers for the harassment and violence they attract, and inflict, on themselves and those around them.

This is not a true-to-life depiction of a small town community in America; it is an allegory of Western culture’s ideology of revenge that permeates everything we do in a society overrun with brutality and violence. Figuring out when to laugh or cry, and why, is what this unforgettable black comedy is all about. You'll do both. 

Rated R. 115 mins. 

 

AMERICAN PSYCHO — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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“American Psycho” (made at the turn of the 21^st century) is a significant connecting link between the ruthless culture of corporate greed revealed in Oliver Stone’s seminal film “Wall Street” and the ascendency of Donald Trump to the throne of United States President.

It’s notable that Stone was temporarily slated to direct “American Psycho,” with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to play the lead, before Mary Harron won the gig with her more perfect casting choice of Christian Bale as the soulless Wall Street narcissist Patrick Bateman.

Coincidentally, “American Psycho” is set in 1987, the same year that “Wall Street” was released on elite American males all to ready to mistake the film’s satire for economic and political doctrine.

With his perfect swimmer’s bod, Patrick Bateman masks his crippling inferiority complex with money and all of its commercially induced trappings. Patrick is a misogynist bully leaked from Donald Trump’s putrid mold.

Something as simple as looking at the (superior) business card designs of his three-piece-suit-wearing Wall Street pals sends our obsessively groomed metrosexual Trump-admirer into a mental breakdown that makes up the meat of the movie. Patrick’s affinity for inane pop music allows Harron to ingeniously show the character’s fractured relationship with society and with his own identity. Before attacking his [perceived] biggest rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) with an axe, Patrick allows himself some editorial commentary in the form of a running dialogue with himself that could just as well be memorized lines from an unnamed music critic’s review.  

“He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Distorting reality is the name of the game. “Facts do not matter. Facts do not exist. Reality is a liar, and information is your enemy.” That quote, taken from a Zach Schonfeld piece for Newsweek about how Donald Trump distorts reality, exquisitely pinpoints the mindset of “American Psycho’s” anti-hero Patrick Bateman (Bale).

More than anything, entitled Patrick wants to “fit in,” namely by inflicting his inflated sense of status on all people he comes in contact with. “His father practically owns the company” he works for. Bateman’s name is an obvious nod to Norman Bates of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Like Norman Bates, Patrick Bateman suffers from a dissociative identity disorder. At times he introduces himself as Pat, or as his perceived rival Paul Allen when opportunity serves him. He gets mistaken for his similarly blank-personality Wall Street associates.

Our reliably unreliable narrator/anti-hero isn’t a human being, he is a product, a false and invisible product of all that is wrong with America.

Bale’s disconnected persona keeps a running inner dialogue of political correctness that enables him to speak up for defending Jews when a colleague makes an anti-Semitic remark. But deep down Patrick wants to humiliate, mutilate, and kill minorities and women in the most brutal ways imaginable.

Harron weaves feminist commentary through two female victims of Bateman’s deep seeded self-hatred. His secretary Jean (Chloë Sevigny) and Christie (Cara Seymour), a street-walker prostitute, serve as opposite sides of the same oppressed female coin. The two women also represent the film’s true protagonists, allowing the audience to empathize in a narrative landscape seemingly devoid of compassion.

Co-screenwriter/director Harron composes the film with Hitchcock-inspired compositions to charge the script’s paper-dry wit with a palpable combination of pulsing suspense and pitch black comedy. Like all great films, “American Psycho” is one you can discover something new in regardless of how many times you’ve seen it.

Rated R. 102 mins. 

Mike picked up INDUSTRIAL ARTS POWER TOOLS IPA for our discussion of Mary Harron's unforgettable adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis's AMERICAN PSYCHO. Pull a chair up to the banquet table and join us for one hell of a feast for one hell of a movie!

Bon appétit!

 

 

THE DETAILS

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Going Dark
American Ethics Get Tested

An eight-year absence from filmmaking pays off in spades for writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes — whose feature debut “Mean Creek” made a splash in 2004. Drawing on elements from his own marriage, Estes crafts a snazzy black comedy that frequently dips into the realm of the absurd if not surreal territories of a bent reality.

Tobey Maguire makes for one hell of an anti-protagonist as Dr. Jeffery Lang, a physician whose marginal approach to life means that he cheated his way through medical school. You couldn’t call him likable, but Maguire manages to keep the audience on his character’s side nonetheless. The filmmaker certainly punishes his wrongheaded protagonist plenty for his sins — some of which are of the indirect variety.

The ingenious narrative kicks off with Dr. Lang taunting the audience in voice-over about how little things like a cheese plate, a bottle of poison, a kidney, and a porn website conspired to crush his ten-year marriage. A piano falls from the sky to smash Jeffery into a pancake. By the end all of the puzzle pieces fit neatly together. And so we have the enjoyment of watching a human “rat” get his gradual comeuppance from a variety of sources.

Marred-life for Jeffery revolves around caring for the worm-rich sod he recently had laid in his backyard. Every night raccoons attack the yard, overturning the sod into a mass of dirt lumps. Jeffery imagines that the sod is at the root of troubles with his attractive wife Nealy (Elizabeth Banks). The couple hasn’t had sex in over six months, and even then it was “make-up” sex. A shouting match fight puts a real-life tone to the expertly devised comedy at hand. Bitterness and acceptance come with the territory.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its accomplished rendering of every single character. Everyone, from Jeffery’s kooky next-door neighbor Lila (hilariously played by Laura Linney in her funniest performance to date) to his basketball practice pal Lincoln (Dennis Haysbert), registers as a leading character.

Kerry Washington shines in a juicy role as Jeffrey’s old college pal Rebecca Mazzoni, the wife of Ray Liotta’s theme-carrying character Peter. Ray Liotta is enjoying something of a career comeback between his impressive performance here, and Andrew Dominik’s Cannes Festival favorite “Killing Them Softly.” Liotta’s contribution to the film’s centerpiece scene of public-spectacle retribution for Jeffrey is a real barnburner. Such sophisticated ensemble black comedies don’t come around often.

“The Details” reflects America’s modern day cynicism derived from its Government-articulated categorical imperative of rewarding corruption — reference the Bush/Obama two trillion seventy billion dollar bailout as a reward to banks, on top of the many billions of dollars the same financial institutions stole with illicit tactics such as credit default swaps. The movie is essentially a comedy of errors that could have been avoided with a more responsible intentionality.

Jeffery can’t get a building permit to make home renovations, so he attempts to placate his neighbor so she won’t report him when he goes ahead with the plans anyway. The one altruistic thing Jeffery does — his one redeeming gesture of profound personal sacrifice — gets rewarded with a shocking bit of misinterpreted violence. Even the act of expressing a vicious wish comes back to haunt him.

Jacob Aaron Estes has made a plucky movie that challenges its audience to examine their own less than ethical behaviors. Just as it is in life, it’s all fun and games until someone looses their household.

Rated R. 91 mins.