By Adam Solomons
5/5
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Almost to the day, ten years ago, Martin McDonagh’s breakthrough In Bruges screened for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival in snowy Colorado. In the decade since I don’t think there’s been a film which walks that tightrope between stunned silence and nervous laughter quite so intricately. And maybe there hasn’t been a film as funny, either.
In the decade since In Bruges (a pretty terrible one, if you’ve been paying attention) the works of the big-screen big names of comedy – Judd Apatow and Adam McKay and Edgar Wright, to name three – have seemed more serious than anything we would previously have called comedy. The Big Short is funny, but it ends in a global financial collapse. In The Big Sick Boy Meets Girl before Girl falls into a coma. And Baby Driver is a bloodbath.
This pivot towards drama among comedy’s best-known auteurs – see also the Coens, too – has allowed for McDonagh, the Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker, to become almost unique in the unapologetic hilarity of his films, namely Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It isn’t the sort of comedy-drama that pounds you into the floor, bringing laughter of the desperate, sympathetic kind. Three Billboards presents a heartbreaking premise and a moral complexity that follows you out of the cinema. All while it makes you laugh like hell. That’s why it’s Best Picture favourite.
McDonagh takes on the unjust institutions of modern America – the police, the church, fat dentists – and it’s great fun watching him do it.
Though all the credit can go to McDonagh. Lucas Hedges, Woody Harrelson and Peter Dinklage in supporting roles are memorably funny. But it’s Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand who steal the show, as the bumbling, racist cop and the badass mother seeking justice for her daughter. Rockwell embodies that pathetic mummy’s boy almost too convincingly, and McDormand scared me when she picked a wine bottle in a packed restaurant, maternal righteousness radiating.
The common (maybe only?) criticism of Three Billboards is that, like La La Land, it lacks a racial awareness that every Trump era film should probably have – especially one set in the rural South. It’s a fair expectation, but I don’t feel Three Billboards fails on this front. Unlike last year’s frontrunner [he-he] McDonagh’s film deals head-on with race in what seemed to me a mature, nuanced fashion.
I suppose we’ll see how the film ages. The stereotype for conventional Best Picture winners is that they’re forgotten soon after picking up the prize: Argo (2012), The Hurt Locker (2009) and The English Patient (1996 – between Titanic and Braveheart) are classics in the genre. If Three Billboards is to win the same award I suspect – and hope – it won’t be forgotten any time soon.
