Movie Review – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

What.A.Woman!

What, a, woman! Probably that’s the only thought that constantly lingers in the mind while watching the movie. ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ is a rare gem which gets the tone of the movie perfect while making it message oriented. It’s not a movie where you’d instantly like the protagonists and it’s not a movie which lures you with the shock value but a carefully constructed mood piece which makes you feel as if you’re inside an exploding chamber, which in the end doesn’t really explode but releases the vacuum in a subtle way.

The biggest advantage of this being a non-native movie was that, even though the title was direct, I didn’t know what was written in the three billboards and as I had not known, it was a great pleasure to decrypt it as the movie began. It doesn’t take much time for the movie to tell you about what the it was all about. But even in those first few minutes, the movie keeps you tensed. Thanks to the setting, lighting, sound, maybe everything but the most important of all was the lady, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand). What an actor Frances McDormand is, who can make any character special. Who can forget her performance in ‘Fargo’? It was one of the movies where anyone would be thinking that she can’t repeat a performance like that or she wouldn’t get such a character again but ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ was equivalent to it.

The director, Martin McDonagh doesn’t look like a man who was into theaters more than films because the way the scenes were shot, it was near perfect. It was one of the excoriatingly beautiful eerie movie which I had seen recently. My last favorite shot movie was ‘Capote’. So you can see that it has lived up to a certain standards. I’ve watched only once and didn’t want to rewatch it just to decode a point. But is it just me or he doesn’t really show all the three billboards together in a single shot. If it was intentional, it was a great piece of work. Because the title was the entirety of the movie and that’s what runs in our mind throughout the movie. In spite of that we don’t see the complete sentence of something which was etched in the movie.

It was a straight forward message oriented movie alright, may be even propagandist but it’s the best possible way one can do a message movie. The characters were so special and end in a fate we least imagine. Be it the death of Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) whom thanks to the title, would have made us think that he’d appear throughout the movie. And Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), true to his name of the character, refines or defines what a dick, a person can be. He and his character was brilliant till the point his face gets burnt.

Look how brilliantly the characters were written. Not a single character in the movie was straight. A lady who has lost her daughter, who casually swears in the household with his son, a husband who has a dumb blonde of a woman who is of their daughters age, a dying Chief, an alcoholic momma’s boy, Dixon etc. it can’t get more clumsy than that but still they all are a part of society and coexist with each other and they need each other to coexist, that’s the beauty. Wish Dixon was a dick throughout the movie because it was too great a movie to see a change in the characteristic of an individual but thankfully he doesn’t emerge out in a traditionally heroic way. Love the doubts that he and Mildred have in the climax and thankfully the movie wasn’t simple enough, where the case gets resolved, yet doesn’t leave us in the hooks like a ‘Memories of Murder’, rather somehow makes us feel the realistic nature of life and gets us attached to the thinking of Dixon and Mildred.

If there was one scene I wish hadn’t happened, it would be the scene where he gets juice from Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones) because it comes after such a great scene. Even if the character has transformed to be a better person post that arson light up, it would have been nice if that juice scene had not happened, it would give a more edgy feel especially in the bar. I probably expected Red to through the juice in his face but would’ve not liked even that had happened. Best would have been to just cut without the audience knowing whether Red knew that it was Dixon or not. Probably he getting a new face is a symbolism to his character transforming? May be. But that was the only weak link of an otherwise glorious movie.

Movie Review – True Grit

Questions over answers

Coen Brothers movies are always curious. It satisfies my appetite not just emotionally but cinematically as well. That’s quite a rarity. Even in the film that I don’t like, I love the way they handle the movie. Especially the way its shot, the location and the frames. It’ll always be top notch. So being a western, for which, cinematography remains an integral aspect, I was naturally curious about the movie. But ‘True Grit’ didn’t appeal to me emotionally as much as it did cinematically. The craftmanship got better of the movie than the personal connect.

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Somehow the tone of the movie reminded me of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’. May be ‘True Grit’ would have served as one of the inspirations for it and I’m looking at it in the other way because I watched ‘True Grit’ later. Anyways both the movies work in same way. A morbid distant way from one’s self where one couldn’t entirely connect with the movie. The scenes in ‘True Grit’ where they take the long path makes us wonder what we are supposed to think. It’s a typical western scene where one would feel the heat and dust of the landscape.

Claimed as revisionist western, it stays true to the genre where we don’t get to root any of them. Be it the protagonist or antagonist. The only bright spot is Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld). What a treasure trove Hailee Steinfeld is. In that way too it reminds of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ because it had a similar character in the form of Trudi Fraser where Julia Butters was terrific.

The film opens with a dead mans daughter trying to search the murderer to avenge her father’s death. She goes to any lengths to achieve it. For a western, it was an unlikely opening. Be it man or woman, it’s always protagonist centric and runs high on machismo. But here we see a confident little girl of fourteen years searching for her father with no hint of being scared. She shows her grit openly and admirably in the opening scenes. The first act worked wonderfully well because of her. The bargain scene was one of the highlights of the first act.

The film starts to wane from the introduction of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). From there it becomes a story of only Cogburn. Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) too joins in the pursuit of getting to Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). There is a huge ego clash between the two but they help each other out during the right moment. There were two moments were they mutually help each other but nothing is dramatized to show the friendship angle because they’re not friends. It’s just a man’s way of lending a helping hand. Mattie Ross, even though acts all brave, the way she exclaims and jumps with joy in the scene where LaBoeuf kills people from a good distance is pure bliss. If other scenes showed what an actor she is. This scene showed how good she could react.

Guess ‘True Grit’ is beyond me. I couldn’t say that I didn’t like it. Guess it employed the elements of Western greatly and made a proper genre movie. But for me it didn’t work. Mainly because of characters who looked plasticky. I neither could vie for them, nor could hate them. What’s more disheartening is that ‘Fargo’ worked like hell for me. Roger Ebert had rightly quoted a quote which I had requoted a number of times. ‘Fargo’ is the reason why one would watch cinema. It’s one of the simple pleasures of life. Don’t get me started on ‘Fargo’. So, when it’s a movie by the makers of ‘Fargo’ it’s disappointing to be disappointed by the film.