Looks like we got us a war.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri arrives in the UK with a quartet of Golden Globes, a clutch of BAFTA nominations and a hatful of Oscar hopes. The poster is already more star-strewn than an Icelandic night-sky, so you don't need me adding to the hype. I'll say only this. When the writer/director is someone as defiantly rule-trashing as Martin McDonagh, and when Frances McDormand is his lead, you should go see a film regardless of prizes. In the case of Three Billboards the less you know the more you'll enjoy, so by all means stop reading and and come back later. I'll still be here.
The derelict billboards of the movie's title are commandeered by Mildred Hayes (McDormand), a longterm resident of rural Ebbing, who has lost her daughter to a particularly appalling crime. Feeling that the local police have failed in their responsibility to investigate, she uses the advertising hoardings to call their Chief (Woody Harrelson) to account. Her actions provoke an indignant reaction from the community, not least from the Chief's dim and bigoted Deputy, Dixon (Sam Rockwell).
Such is the set-up - and while the story trades off the increasing friction between Mildred and her neighbours, most of them fiercely loyal to Chief Willoughby and scandalised by Mildred's gesture, it does precisely nothing else you might expect. Pick any of the story's three central characters and try to predict the journey they'll go on before the end credits. You'll get it completely, refreshingly wrong.
This is all due to writing that, as McDonagh poined out during a recent interview, is rooted in character rather than deliberately manipulative plot twists. Mildred and her police nemeses behave throughout in ways that ring excruciatingly or comically true. The resulting events are messy and unpredictable - laced with as much dark humour as they are with poignancy, peppered with moments of shocking violence and unexpected humanity. It's as ragged as real life, all the way to the film's divisive ending. The one violent act that remains unseen, thankfully, is that which sets the story in motion. The terrible fate of Mildred's daughter we can only imagine, along with the poor girl's mother and brother (up-and-comer Lucas Hedges).
Frances McDormand is the tough, broken heart of the movie - reminding us, if we needed it, of what an astonishing screen presence she is. As Mildred she's moving without being sentimental and funny without being cute, holding the audience's sympathy however questionable her actions become. This is a portrait of grief hardened into anger, of a woman relentlessly seeking closure and raising hell in the process. Indications of the person she was prior to the tragedy glint with a subtlety only a truly accomplished actor can convey.
She's not alone in delivering greatness. Woody Harrelson has never been more convincing as the decent, beleaguered police chief who butts heads with Mildred. Sam Rockwell, meanwhile, gives a stand-out performance in his quietly brilliant career. As bumbling racist Dixon he's appalling and hilarious, and yet somehow still enlists our sympathy. Add to that a wealth of quality support performances (the always wonderful Peter Dinklage and Get Out's Caleb Landry Jones jump to mind) and you've got as well-acted a movie as we can hope to see in 2018.
The broader storytelling is terrific too. McDonagh's screenplay is pithy, profane and real, with small-town shades of Manchester by the Sea (and that film's sense of a community that's been around forever). Ben Davis' cinematography is edgy at times, starkly beautiful at others, and the whole thing is edited down to a sharp focus on the main character-arcs. Meanwhile Carter Burwell's original score provides a moody compliment to the dark subject-matter, while the borrowed tunes are as varied as the movie's frequent shifts in tone.
Three Billboards is ultimately a story of one woman's quest for justice, along with its results and repercussions. Its refusal to offer easy resolutions is frustrating, deliberately so. What is does provide, however, is empathy, grim laughter and a whole lot to think about. It's also one of the most innovative dramas you're likely to see this year - or most others.
Gut Reaction: Laughter, cruelty and compassion, all of them when least expected.
Where are the Women?: McDonagh gives Frances McDormand room to shine, in what is arguably the role of her film career. And that's having seen Fargo.
Ed's Verdict: 9/10. Another true original from the man who brought us In Bruges. Character-driven storytelling, which entertains, challenges and delves deep into our messed-up humanity. Shelve the awards buzz. Just go and enjoy it.
And like that, he's gone. - 'Verbal' - The Usual Suspects
I saw The Usual Suspects on its 1995 release and was bowled over by it, not least because of Kevin Spacey's performance. As talkative criminal Roger 'Verbal' Kint he was the connective tissue that held the film's complex plot together. His conversations with Detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), in which he spun the story of a near-satanic crime-boss named Keyser Soze, were compulsively watchable. You hung on this actor's every word, even if like me you'd no idea who he was, and knew instinctively he was a special kind of talent. Long before that explosive conclusion.
Within months he showed up uncredited in Se7en, and the audience's response was Oh crap, look! It's the guy from The Usual Suspects! And in that moment an already thrilling movie upped itself a couple more gears. A latter-day screen great had arrived, and we were witness to it.
So it was gutting for me along with many others to read reports that this unassuming giant of modern cinema (and of TV, and of London theatre) may have behaved in a less-than-magnificent Weinsteinian way in his off-screen life. We always want our heroes, be they political or sporting or cultural, to live private lives that match what we admire about them professionally. When they fall far short of that, we feel a peculiar sense of betrayal. Their achievements, all that we have admired about them, seem permanently tarnished. More than that we may feel that it's some form of moral compromise to actively enjoying their work anymore, or that they don't deserve us to do so.
'I'll never be able to watch that film again.'
'I don't think I can finish House of Cards now.'
'Baby Driver's a great movie. Even though... You know.'
And so on.
I understand the emotion, truly I do. Something is inevitably lost when we associate the person on-screen with reprehensible behaviour, particularly when it's of a sexually predatory nature. However there's an additional impulse on the part of some people (and TV networks) to erase all traces of the accused actor's professional output. And that I can't be dealing with.
Don't misunderstand me. When an actor's illegal sexual predilections are brought to light, it's a just consequence that they never work within that industry again. If they happen to head up a project that will fall apart without their input (as seems to be happening with House of Cards) then that will be an unfortunate but unavoidable loss. And if, as happened in All the Money in the World, the offending contributor's role can be replaced by a different actor's performance to avoid commercial disaster, call it a valid business decision made in difficult circumstances.
However, I'm talking about something rather different than any of those scenarios.
What I'm referring to is the actor's body of work already out there in the public domain - the DVDs nestling in people's personal collections and the movies doing the rounds of network TV. Can LA Confidential and American Beauty and (to a much lesser extent) Horrible Bosses 2 never be enjoyed again? Well of course they can. In fact they should be, for a number of reasons.
Art is very seldom created in a vacuum. Take The Usual Suspects. That film is a highly regarded ensemble piece with a clutch of fine performances. It's arguably the best work of director Bryan Singer (who, I have sighed at being reminded, is also enmeshed in allegations of abuse) and a memorable piece of screen-writing by Christopher McQuarrie. Add to that the hundreds of others who were employed in the movie's creation - the production designers and lighting crew and foley artists. Are the results of their Herculean labours (and any motion picture is a huge feat of combined strength) no longer to be appreciated, because one member of the team, however high-profile, behaved in some unconscionable way? If the Best Boy turned out have the Worst off-set proclivities, would that invalidate the work everyone else had done? (Can too many rhetorical questions be used in one blog post?)
That kind of thinking, logically pursued, would result in any film produced by Harney Weinstein being off-limits. Goodbye Shakespeare in Love, The King's Speech and Paddington. We might feel similarly reluctant to watch Roman Polanski movies again, including greats such as Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist. Those two names alone establish one potentially lengthy cinematic hit-list.
Of course it's easier to set aside our reservations if the offending party is not slam-bang in front of the camera. My own response to certain actors has been coloured, for example, by reports of their diva-esque on-set behaviour. (You were great in Hostiles, Christian Bale, but that tantrum of yours recorded on the set of Terminator: Salvation lives long in the memory. Longer, it turns out, than the film itself.) Yes - you may feel uncomfortable watching Spacey as 'Verbal' these days, but that brings up a whole other question. To what extent are we able to view someone's creation as a separate entity?
If you were to discover that the artist of your favourite National Gallery painting had been a serial spouse-murderer, would that make it any less beautiful, objectively speaking? Look - there's their signature on it, and removing that signature won't make it any less theirs. So the options are to stop visiting the Gallery or to deal with the mental conundrum. Take it a step further and imagine that the electrician who wired your house turns out to have a huge walk-in closet's worth of skeletons (real or metaphorical) rattling around. Are you going to rip out all the wiring, because every time you flick a switch you benefit from his workmanship? Not unless your reservations have evolved into fully-fledged psychosis.
None of which deals with the discomfort factor of watching an actor credibly suspected of having done something horrible. Perhaps there's a trick to it - some kind of 1984-style double-think. To throw your mind back to when you first watched the film/TV show, ignorant of that actor's off-set behaviour, and enjoy it as you did then. Or to imagine a parallel reality, where the individual was as decent in their private life as you'd hoped.
I've yet to experiment with The Usual Suspects in this regard, so I can't say for sure. But I'm reminded of a recent comment made by a friend - that she can't imagine never watching American Beauty again. I hope she finds herself able to do so, and to take pleasure in what she loved about the movie first time around, including Kevin Spacey's performance as Lester Burnham. I hope I can do the same for 'Verbal' Kint in The Usual Suspects. May we all somehow keep loving those performances, even if sadly we no longer feel able to love the guy who performed them.
You have no idea what war does to a man.
I'll get it said at the start - I'm unapologetically a fan of westerns. At their best they're hard-edged morality plays, exploring our most primal human traits. It's clear that writer/director Scott Cooper loves the genre too, in fact it seems he's been steeped in it from birth. His new film Hostiles combines the sweeping vistas of the classic John Ford era with the brutality of Clint Eastwood's revisionist westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven. The result is a tough, unflinching character drama on an epic backdrop. It's gruelling, and it's beautiful.
Set in post-Civil War America Hostiles stars Christian Bale as Union Cavalry officer Joseph Blocker, a man possessed by hatred of the Cheyenne tribesmen he has been fighting for decades. His final mission before retirement, ironically, is to escort a dying Cheyenne chief and his family back to their native Montana, so that the man can die on his home territory. Thus Blocker's longtime enemy falls within his and his men's protection.
The trek from the New Mexico fort across the wilds of Colorado is complicated by an encounter with frontierswoman Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), who has undergone trauma all her own. And the entire group comes under threat from a ruthless group of Comanches, who may prevent any of them - white or Native American - from completing their journey. To say the road ahead will be tough is a spectacular understatement.
Hostiles covers well-worn storytelling territory, but delves deeper than usual into the psychological toll of conflict on cavalry soldiers. Bale is excellent as Blocker, a man burnt out by war and poisoned by hatred, whose odyssey will force him to confront his own nature and the crimes of his people. Recovering his long-buried humanity is a painful business in itself, each moment registering deep in his eyes. Rory Cochrane and Ben Foster, as fellow Union soldiers, flesh out the theme of what a long, dubious military campaign can do to a man's soul. And in the middle of it all is Rosamund Pike delivering a performance of heartrending sincerity, as a strong woman in scarcely bearable circumstances. Her humanity acts as a striking counterpoint to the hostility that surrounds her.
The movie has been criticised for presenting its Native American characters as symbols rather than fully fledged characters. In truth there's a whole other film to be made representing the experience of the Cheyenne characters here. For now we have Wes Studi (Dances With Wolves) - portraying stoicism and dignity as Blocker's one-time nemesis Chief Yellow Hawk. As for his family, it's undeniable they could be provided with a greater sense of depth, even with a few extended scenes.
My overriding memory, however, is of a film made frame by frame with western-love. The cinematography is lush, as though to compensate for the overriding sense of threat - although to be fair, the most upsetting acts of violence occur fleetingly or off-camera. Much more time is spent building up the sense of reflection on lives lived too long in a spirit of vengeance. Conversations are gruff but poignant, the camera lingering on stricken faces, while Max Richter's score is a haunting lament. And if the dialogue is lifted almost wholesale from Unforgiven at one point, it's less plagiarism and more homage to Eastwood's story of violence's terrible cost.
This isn't a fun night out at the movies, but it is a gorgeous and gripping one. And it confronts tough truths, before seeking out what grains of redemption it can find.
Gut Reaction: Awe at the beauty and knuckle-chewing at the sheer weight of emotional pain.
Where are the Women?: America's new frontier was particularly unforgiving to the gals, and Rosamund Pike does well to invest her role with this much iron.
Ed's Verdict: 7.5/10. Hostiles reaches for the heights of the cowboy greats and makes it a good part of the way due to stunning visuals, moments of dramatic resonance and heavyweight performances from its leads. Be warned though - it's tough as beef jerky and there simply aren't any jokes.
I don't have any money to spare.
It's become known as the film where Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey in last-minute reshoots, but Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World is worth plenty of publicity in its own right. Concerned with the 1973 kidnapping of billionaire J Paul Getty's grandson, this is an absorbing tale of financial greed and its terrible cost. Some of the characters and events portrayed are fictional, as the movie frankly states, but the core is based on the case's shocking facts and is painfully, believably human.
The kidnapping in Rome of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III kicks off the film, the Getty family history and source of its wealth being neatly sketched via flashback. The story's focus becomes the boy's mother Abigail (Michelle Williams), shut out from the Getty family's money and dependent on the charity of her ex-father-in-law for the $17 million demanded by the kidnappers. Her problem, and the factually-accurate crux of the story's drama, is that Getty senior will not part with a cent in order to see his grandson returned. So working with the Italian police and Getty's financial negotiator Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlburg), she shoulders the frustrating task herself.
All the Money in the World is a stately-paced but fascinating drama, that looks deep into the soul of a man possessed by his own wealth. The muted colours of Scott's film suggest a grim business empire and a life drained of all joy by frugality and fear. It says much about the director's mastery of this project that the re-created scenes - Plummer taking on the pivotal role of Getty - fit seamlessly into the movie as a whole. Given a script of genuine weight and worth (and not, say, Alien: Covenant) there's no more coherent director than Scott working today, and this one shows him at his storytelling best.
As the tycoon, Plummer is a mesmerizing replacement. This portrayal is no reprise of his recent turn as Scrooge (in The Man Who Invented Christmas). His Getty is a charming, plausible miser, who on paper gives good reasons for withholding the ransom, while retaining a heart of near-impenetrable stone. This is a pathological kind of meanness, its psychological complexity revealed through numerous subtle touches in the script, some of them darkly comic.
The emotional heart of the story is the kidnap victim's fraught mother. Williams is a long way here from her luminescence in The Greatest Showman. As Abigail she has a quiet steely resolve, not crying on cue as the media demand, but rather sublimating all her pain and resentment so that she can focus on the task of rescuing her son. Wahlberg is similarly restrained as Getty's fixer, while Romain Duris suggests more humanity as one of the kidnappers than the billionaire ever does. (The squalid scenes involving the kidnapped boy are a regular reminder of what's at stake and how fragile the situation actually is.)
A dramatic slow-burn, All the Money in the World works best as a modern parable of greed, where life is reduced to a series of financial transactions and a human being to nothing more than a commodity. It's a bleak picture, but a grimly convincing one.
Gut Reaction: Immersion in the (occasionally excruciating) drama and wry chuckling at the astonishing behaviour of J Paul Getty.
Where are the Women?: Michelle Williams is a humazing factor in the male-dominated business world of the 1970s. Her mother-love isn't sentimentalised though, it's gritty.
Ed's Verdict: 8/10. Top-drawer Ridley Scott, Plummer's magnificent eleventh-hour performance complimenting that of Williams. A nice change of pace from this month's other capitalist critique Molly's Game.
You spent eight years running the world's most exclusive, glamorous and decadent man-cave.
Anyone familiar with Aaron Sorkin's work (The West Wing, The Newsroom, The Social Network) will know what he does best - create intensely written drama from the minutiae of professional life. Politicians, lawyers, journalists and CEOs have all come under his scrutiny to engrossing effect. In Molly's Game he focuses that same intelligence as both writer and director towards the world of high-end gambling, with Jessica Chastain running the proceedings. It proves a potent dramatic cocktail.
The film is based on the real-life Molly Blume's own memoir of how she, a one-time Olympic skiing hopeful and political science graduate, ended up at twenty-six running a high-stakes LA poker game. Business tycoons and celebrities were the regular players, the game moving and growing until after eight years it drew the worrying attention of the FBI. This we all know in the movie's first ten minutes, Blume calling on the services of lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) to defend her against some extraordinary charges. What unfolds during the lawyer/client exchanges is a compelling story of how one woman operated within that toxic world, before events tumbled out of control and threatened to destroy everything she had.
Sorkin's writing style has always been clever-clogs dialogue that rattles along at around three hundred words a minute and expects the audience to keep up. His visual style as a first-time director matches that, lightening edits zipping us through Molly's story at the same break-neck pace with which she narrates (and at one point skis). Combined with the fevered environment of the gambling rooms, it's reminiscent of Scorsese epics Goodfellas or (obviously) Casino. It works too, in that even if the poker stuff is baffling to non-players, the drama always makes sense, rivetingly so.
This pacy recounting of Molly's gambling hostess days is inter-cut with the lawyer's office scenes - less frenetic visually, but still fuelled by that astonishing mile-a-minute dialogue. It's the one issue you might take with Sorkin's writing - so often his characters speak with that rapid-fire hyper-intelligence that you virtually never hear in real life. That said, it's great fun to hang out for two hours in a world where the characters do have words and wit as sharp as a sushi knife. This reality is heightened, and it's exhilarating to experience.
Jessica Chastain is a perfect fit for such a world and for her character. She brings the same smarts to Molly as she did last year to her title role in Miss Sloane, and indeed the women are similar - composed, super-competent, high-functioning addicts, steering an impressive course through what has been a traditionally male world. The sheer poise and take-no-crap determination with which she does it means you root for her from the start. Idris Elba is thankfully a match for her, so that their wrangling as lawyer and client becomes another of the film's delights. The reason this righteous man agrees to take her case adds a whole other layer to Molly's character and provides the story with a surprising moral centre. (Not a bad thing, after all that high-end gambling den grubbiness.)
With Kevin Costner as Molly's demanding dad and a couple of other enjoyable cameo surprises thrown in, Molly's Game is slick and smart entertainment from its adrenaline-rush opening. Yes it's intellectually demanding, but this is a story with which you'll definitely want to keep up.
Gut Reaction: Seriously watching throughout, seriously satisfied at the end.
Where are the Women?: Jessica C is the poster-girl for strong smart women portraying the same on-screen. Her Molly plays the game with self-possession and style.
Ed's Verdict: 8/10. Demanding, lightening-paced drama, with a reserved but powerful central performance and support to match. Perfect for dusting down your New Year mental cobwebs.
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. Neil Gaiman.
Cinematically speaking, 2017 was a year of blockbuster failures and leftfield successes. It was also a year that showed considerable diversity in film content, suggesting a move towards cinema that's representative of all the talent out there. Yes there was dross, but as a year in film it reassured me that the industry overall is in a decent state of health and well able to compete with the continued rise of Netflix and Amazon - something I discussed here, and elaborated on here, so consider my point made on that subject.
Now to 2018 - a year so ripe with filmic promise that it gives me chills. As ever the schedule for the early part of the year has firmed up, while summer onwards is marked out in big studio releases alone, with smaller projects potentially of equal interest are still jostling for space. But already the forthcoming twelve-months is shaping up to deliver a good crop of big-screen stories. (May I not rue those words by the end of December.) Here are a few highlights.
Awards Season Magic
Awards contenders tend to hit US screens in November/December, meaning that here in the UK we receive all kinds of cinema treats to help us through the bleakness of January. This year there are so many impressive-looking films it's frankly silly. Molly's Game. Hostiles. All the Money in the World. Darkest Hour. The Post. Downsizing. I'm hoping they'll drain me of positive adjectives. But the one that's really making my stomach buzz with anticipation if Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, starring Frances McDormand. From Fargo. In a film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. The writer/director of In Bruges. And people are saying it's the best thing either of them have ever done. So can I see it right now? Damn. It transpires I'll have to wait till January 12th.
Saoirse Ronan
Pronounced seer-sha. Anyone who's seen the film Brooklyn will know what an amazing and radiant screen presence Saoirse Ronan is. Well she's going to light it up twice this year in two very different coming-of-age dramas. Lady Bird opens in February here in the UK, having already garnered impressive reviews elsewhere. And in June we'll see her in an adaptation of Ian McEwan's painfully beautiful novel On Chesil Beach. At twenty-three this girl is only starting what promises to be a brilliant career - the kind that's a privilege to watch unfolding.
Marvel Cinematic Universe
I'm not a massive geek, but I am a bit of a one. And I seriously love Marvel's ever-extending universe, with all its movie-crossovers, humour and exuberant sense of fun. This year has three Marvel releases lined up - Black Panther (their first leading black superhero in an exotic-looking African location), Ant-Man and the Wasp (a bickering superhero couple - what's not to love?) and the colossus that will be Avengers: Infinity War. The last of those will include just about every major character in their storytelling universe to date, and could be anything from a triumph to a catastrophic mess. You've got to relish stakes that high. It opens on April 28th in the UK, a week before its US release. My verdict will be swift and to the point.
Great Directors - Great Films?
Steven Spielberg is doing more than hitting us with a Streep/Hanks combo in journalistic drama The Post. He's also giving us fun-time Steve with March release Ready Player One. It looks like a big effects-driven crazy-fest - hopefully Jurassic Park-levels of entertainment, or something close. Guillermo del Toro has already gifted the human race with Pan's Labyrinth, so he owes us nothing; but February will bestow on us the weird wonder that is The Shape of Water. Paul Thomas Anderson, the mind behind one of my all-time favourite films Magnolia, is directing Daniel Day Lewis in what the actor claims will be his final screen performance - Phantom Thread. It's promising to be a divisive piece of storytelling. And Alex Garland is following up the fascinating and disturbing Ex-Machina with environmental sci-fi thriller Annihilation. Good name. Great movie?
Family Friendliness
Last year's Paddington 2 reminded us that family films can be great films. With that in mind I have high hopes for a few titles this year. Pixar are landing a double whammy of Coco, where they transport us to a spectacular Mexican Land of the Dead, and Incredibles 2, which will hopefully provide the same high-scoring fun levels as the original. Aardman Animation bring us their trademark toothily grinning characters in Early Man, the studio's first stop-motion feature since 2015's Shaun the Sheep Movie. Then November will plunge us back into J K Rowling's wizarding world in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, with Jude Law making an already controversial debut as the younger Albus Dumbledore. And the year will end with what might be an act of either cinematic worship or blasphemy, when Marry Poppins Returns (Gor Blimey). Emily Blunt is the brave soul taking up Julie Andrews' iconic brolly, hopefully to supercalifragilistic effect.
And that's a mere scattering of what's already on offer this year. Plus there'll be other intriguing projects popping up that have thus far remained beneath the publicity radar, while I scramble to take it all in. Which brings me to my...
Filmic Resolutions 2018
1. To cover both mainstream and independent films, as much as my local multiplex and trips into London allow.
2. To keep all reviews pithy, succinct and as spoiler-free as possible, while still saying something of merit about each title.
3. To take a glass-half-full approach to people's work and only hate on something when it really deserves it.
4. To use a rating system at last - no gimmicks, just a straight score out of 10. (I may resort to decimals.)
5. To introduce a new 'Where are the Women?' feature in pursuit of gender equality in the film industry. Because it matters. Right on.
Okay, that's it. My first review of the year will follow shortly.
Happy New Year, and here's wishing you 2018 filmic forays of your own.
