Amerika

January film of the month is a close call between Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Missouri and Alexander Payne's Downsizing. McDonagh immediately grips his audience. Oooh ahh: this film has some space and nuance never letting you go even at the unresolved end. What intrigues is that this just isn't 'an American film'. It looks like America, sounds like America, feels like America but an hour or so after the film ends you realize it is all an elaborate theatrical black farce in the Strinbergian/Munch sense. Meaning: it really has to be 'the real abstracted'. Thus Abbie Cornish as the young intelligent wife and mother of the middle-aging small town Sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) doesn't seem at all awkwardly out of place with her Australian/Brit accent or mention of Oscar Wilde.

He is a brilliant writer/director Martin McDonagh.  Most seeing this film in the U.K. won't have an inkling of just how 'real' are these characters unless having lived Stateside. It isn't that you know these specific characters but that they embody a speciosity of human traits that you meet in one-degree of separation when you get around a bit in the States. That's McDonagh's genius: he can be the hyper-real that is so so close to the bone it's funny and painful. One Brit crit felt the only false note was the fawn that Mildred (Frances McDormond) talks to about her dead daughter. That didn't even bother me. Maybe because in reality I do talk to the doe that has frequented my garden for years. She acknowledges a voice/a scent/ then moves on chewing or licking her fawns. We 'rub along together'.

One would hope that all Americans were as nuanced as McDonagh's characters. Yet…

The greatest strength of this movie is that while you don't really forgive any of the characters for their weaknesses you hope that life will make just that little more sense next time you want to kick it in the teeth. Ironically, not a great film advertisement for small town dentistry! Breathe and think of how perilous it is to be a lame doe procreating fawn year after year after year. She is wary of me no longer scared. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.