Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017, Martin McDonagh)

The premise of Three Billboards (etc.) is quite simple: months have passed since a young girl was brutally raped and murdered in Ebbing, Missouri, and the local police force seems to have given up the case. Her mother then hires three billboards outside town to accuse the chief of police of negligence ... Problem is: this chief of police is not an asshole, but a nice guy who did his best to solve the crime and he also happens to suffer from terminal pancreas cancer. When Willoughby commits suicide because of his illness and the unbearable pains he'll have to endure, the inhabitants think he did it because of the three billboards outside town and blame Mildred ...

And all hell breaks loose ...

What kind of movie is this? A black comedy? Or is it a serious drama that is at the same time funny? Whatever it is, it is well-made and tremendously well-acted. Both Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson are perfectly cast as the two main opponents, the mother and the chief of police, and Sam Rockwell turns in a terrific performance as the redneck sergeant who still lives with his mum. This is a better movie than The Shape of Water, its major rival in the Oscar race for Best Picture, but it's not flawless either.

Writer/director McDonagh skillfully plays with people's expectations, revealing layer after layer of both the movie's plot and characters. The story will most certainly keep you hooked, but some of its contrivances seem a little absurd. Three Billboards is about traumatic experiences people are unable to forget, but most characters seem strangely unaffected by what's happening to them (or to others) in the course of the movie. In Ebbing, Missouri you can burn down an entire police station and even a person who nearly died in the fire won't bear a grudge against you. And like one critic wrote: the conclusion seems to be that it's okay to be a cunt, but not a dick (*1).

Controversy

Ironically the film's script was criticized by some, not because of its improbabilities, but because it seems to condone sergeant Dixon's redneck behavior. Through a series of machinations the character is turned, in the final stages of the movie, from a brute into a more amiable person.  Obviously the intension of the film makers was to illustrate his growth as a person, not to condone his racist ideas (he was clearly presented as an immature person in the first three quarters of the movie), but most of these machinations rely too much on coincidence or sound so far-fetched that the whole idea of redemption and forgiveness is blurred.

⭐⭐⭐

Note:

* (1) Alicia Queen in her on-line review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG3Qh90vszs&feature=youtu.be

Frances McDormand (Mildred Hayes), Woody Harrelson (Willoughby), Sam Rockwell (Dixon), Sandy Martin (Mrs. Dixon), Caleb Landry Jones (Red Welby), Nick Searcy (Father Montgomery), Lucas Hedges (Robbie), John Hawkes (Charlie), Abbie Cornish (Anne Willoughby), Kerry Condon (Pamela), Kathryn Newton (Angela), Amanda Warren (Denise Watson)

Easy Rider (1969)

A man went looking for America

And couldn't find it anywhere

That man is Wyatt, knick-named Captain America because of the Stars & Stripes on his helmet and chopper. He and his friend Billy want to join the Mardi Grass festivities in New Orleans. En route they pick up a hitch-hiker, visit a hippie community, are arrested when joining a parade without permit, meet an alcoholic lawyer in jail, attract some undesired attention of locals and have a bad acid trip. They eventually reach New Orleans, so Billy thinks they made it, but Captain America, the more philosophical of the two, knows better: they blew it. They have reached New Orleans, but haven't found America.

Fonda and Hopper had both appeared in biker movies before (Fonda in The Wild Angels, Hopper in The Glory Stompers) but Easy Rider is *not* just another movie about biker gangs or outlaw bikers: Captain America and his friend are involved in drug smuggling at the beginning of the movie, but they're no outlaws or Hell's Angels and the movie refrains from the gratuitous violence of the previous biker movies. Wyatt and Bill are freewheeling bikers: they're anti-establishment but not anti-social. They envy a farmer who lives off the land with his large family ("You can be proud of yourself"). At some point, George Hanson, the alcohol lawyer (Jack Nicholson) says:

" You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."

Easy Rider is a movie about a country in transition, about the collision of the Old and New, of the City versus the Countryside, of what has vanished and what is yet to come. Fonda had the idea to construct the movie as a new kind of western: he had recently watched John Ford's The Searchers (1956) in which the protagonists are looking for a girl who was abducted by the Indians; in Easy Rider the two would instead be looking for America. Wyatt and Billy are named after Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid and their journey to the East mirrors the trek to the West of the original settlers: voyagers go looking for a better life and discover that the paradise they were dreaming is not up there for the grabs.

From the start, Easy Rider was a Fonda-Hopper project: Fonda would produce, Hopper direct and both would work on the script. A rough cut had a much longer running-time and an experimental structure, but in post-production most story elements and experimental narrative effects (flash forwards, jump cuts, hand-held camera shots, etc.) were edited out. The finished movie is a succession of vignettes, all with their own mood and structure, virtually without any overarching narrative. On the surface, Easy Rider offers a typical, almost stereotyped image of the Sixties:  drugs, hippies, free love; it also shares some of its obsessions of the decade about the end of materialism and going back to nature, but it's not naïve in its approach: it's a movie about the dreams the young ones had, but also about their disillusions.

The movie is immensely helped by László Kovács' magnificent cinematography of the landscape and a now classic soundtrack. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were asked to write an original score, but eventually it was decided to use existing tracks by Steppenwolf, The Byrds, the Band, Jimi Hendrix and others.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Miscellaneous:

* The title 'Easy Rider' is a little erratic. Most people have interpreted as a reference to bikers, but its original meaning was a horseman or a horse easy to ride. In the Sixties it was used in relation to free love: men who lived with women who practiced it, had a 'free ride'. Occasionally the term was also used for someone who visited prostitutes (the boys in fact visit a whorehouse in New Orleans)

* The tracks used on the soundtrack were chosen by editor Donn Cambern; he used music from his own record collection 'to get in the mood' during the editing process. When confronted with some of the results, Fonda and Hopper decided to skip the ideas for an original soundtrack by CSN&Y. In return Hopper grew a David Crosby moustache for the movie ...

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1969 - Directed by Dennis Hopper, produced by Peter Fonda, written by Peter Fonda, Terry Southern and Dennis Hopper - Cast: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew, Karen Black, Michael Pataki, Toni Basil