By Chip Chandler — Digital Content Producer
Thoughts on Lady Bird, 2017's finest film yet, plus a fierce but flawed Frances McDormand film and the stylish but shallow pleasures of Orient Express.
Lady Bird
Writer-director Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is at once a frequently hysterical comedy and a slice-of-life drama so real that it often hurts.
It's also one of the best movies to screen in Amarillo in 2017.
Gerwig got her start in the indie movie scene as an actor and writer; she also co-directed Nights and Weekends in 2008. Her career gained mainstream prominence with 2013's Frances Ha, but she's still more of an indie darling. Here's hoping Lady Bird makes her career explode, because it signals the arrival of a fully formed, singular talent.
Irish actress Saoirse Ronan stars as the titular "Lady Bird," a nickname she bestowed upon herself in one of many efforts to make herself stand out. She's a senior at a Sacramento, Calif., all-girls Catholic school, desperate to both fit in and get out. She's a fantastic creation, achingly real and magnificently played.
The film follows her senior year in high school (and a little beyond), dealing with heartbreak caused by two boys (Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet), a fractured relationship with her best friend (Beanie Feldstein) and her attempt to score admission to a liberal arts college on the East coast — any one will do, as long as it's not a college in California.
But mostly, Lady Bird details — so, so precisely — the bumpy relationship between daughter and mother, a psychiatric nurse played with remarkable specificity by Laurie Metcalf. Lady Bird and Marion love each other fiercely, as does the family as a whole, but Lady Bird both craves affection and actively rejects it, and Marion both adores her child and is incredibly annoyed by her. Plus, Marion is working herself to the bone to keep the family afloat because her husband (playwright and actor Tracy Letts) is out of work, and Lady Bird's older brother and his girlfriend still live at home, too.
Gerwig is extraordinarily conscious of class and economic struggles, which gives the film a great weight but in a way that's never oppressive — just thoroughly relatable. Lady Bird wants to break into the A-list crowd and jumps at the chance to hang out with too-cool-for-school Jenna (Odeya Rush), callously leaving behind Julie (Feldstein). And Lady Bird and Marion find respite from their squabbles by crashing the nicer neighborhoods and visiting open houses at homes they could never dream of affording.
Gerwig is equally careful to extend warmth and affection to all of her characters. We get flashes of the insecurity that drives Jenna to be a twit, of the lighter side of the seemingly stern principal (the great Lois Smith), of the familial pain that causes Kyle (Chalamet) to put on a cooler-than-thou shell, of what makes Danny (Hedges) a less-than-ideal boyfriend (but, later, a great friend) — and, especially, all of the complications of Lady Bird and all of her family. When Lady Bird complains to Danny about her latest frustration with her mother, Danny agrees that Marion is "too hard" on her — which just makes Lady Bird immediately come to her mom's defense.
And, just like life, Lady Bird is frequently hilarious. The Catholic girls' school has three choices for its prom theme: "Cities of the world, eternal flames or movies." Kyle's the kind of pretentious, privileged teen who wants to live on the barter system because "I'm trying not to participate in our economy." An assistant coach takes over the drama department and has an unexpected directing process.
Gerwig has a light but nuanced touch that's remarkable. This is one that's absolutely not to be missed. (R for language, sexual content, brief graphic nudity and teen partying; click here for showtimes at Cinemark Hollywood 16, 9100 Canyon Drive)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Here's what you can't deny about the evocatively named Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Frances McDormand is a freaking force of nature, and you best stay out of her way.
That writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) was inspired to write a movie for her is a profoundly good thing. That he chose as her costars the likes of Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Lucas Hedges, Zeljko Ivanek, Peter Dinklage, John Hawkes, Clarke Peters and Caleb Landry Jones is also a profoundly good thing.
But McDonagh has a crucial error in judgment in the plot and, even more so, in the tone that I found just too much to overcome.
McDormand stars as a grieving mother, Mildred. Several months prior, her daughter was found dead near the family home on the outskirts of this small (fictional) Missouri town. The daughter was raped while dying, then burned. It's a horrible, awful crime. Characters in In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths also committed horrible, awful crimes, but the audience wasn't supposed to take anything seriously in those films. But it's hard not to take the rape and murder of a young woman seriously, and McDonagh struggles to balance the film's tone between the very serious nature of the daughter's death (and a few other plot points) with our joy in seeing McDormand fully let loose a blast of righteous indignation and vengeance.
And boy, does she. Mildred rents those three titular billboards, conveniently located both near her house and at the scene of her daughter's murder, and demands an answer to the mystery of her daughter's killer's identity and shames the local police force for what she perceives to be their lack of interest in the case: “Raped while dying,” “And still no arrests?” “How come, Chief Willoughby?”
Willoughby (Harrelson) appears to be a good man — and, for added measure, he's dealing with a fatal cancer diagnosis. It's hard not to have sympathy for him, and Harrelson and McDormand are great sparring problems. But my sympathy for Willoughby only went so far; not only did he, apparently, do little when Mildred's ex-husband (Hawkes) was violently abusing her, but he continues to countenance the presence of mama's boy Jason Dixon (Rockwell) on his staff. Dixon is notorious for the torture of a black man in police custody, and the viewers soon see that he's got such major issues with his temper that racism doesn't dictate all of his victims.
He's just an all-around crappy guy — which is what's so frustrating when McDonagh shifts the story to bring Dixon more to the forefront. It's an admirable instinct to look for the humanity even in the worst people, but McDonagh doesn't lay enough groundwork to make Dixon's change of heart plausible, much less to hold him as an equal to Mildred, whose flaws, while serious, aren't really comparable to Dixon's.
It's intriguing that McDonagh wanted to make a film like this in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the general racist onslaught that has been 2017. But outside of Peters' too-good-to-be-true interim police chief and Mildred's co-worker, who's used as a pawn by Dixon, there are no black characters of note. That's ... problematic.
Even with those major issues, I'd still recommend seeing Three Billboards. It certainly does provoke thought, and McDormand's performance is a marvel to behold. (R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual references; click here for showtimes at Hollywood 16)
Murder on the Orient Express
There's a lot of frippery in Kenneth Branagh's new version of Murder on the Orient Express, and I suspect your tolerance for excess will determine how well you like the movie.
For one thing, there's the ridiculously stacked cast, following the example of the Oscar-nominated 1974 original version (with the likes of Albert Finney and Lauren Bacall): Here, we've got Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Daisy Ridley, Josh Gad, Penélope Cruz, Olivia Colman and Leslie Odom Jr., not to mention Branagh himself as a fussy, haunted Hercule Poirot.
For another, there's Branagh's total glee in using copious CGI and a constantly moving camera to liven up a story that's mostly set aboard the eponymous train, where Depp's Ratchett, an obvious no-goodnik, is found dead early one morning (but after he has a riveting conversation with Poirot in one of the film's best scenes, despite my general aversion to Depp).
Everyone's a suspect, and with the train conveniently stopped on the tracks following a small avalanche, Poirot has his suspected criminals confined, all the better to grill them and use his outlandishly good detective skills to unmask the killer.
If you've never read the book or seen any of its previous versions (there also was a made-for-TV one with David Suchet), that unmasking may come as a surprise. If you know the resolution, you won't find much to go on in any of the characters' behavior; they're all a little bit suspicious but no major clues stand out — all the better to astound us with Poirot's abilities, I suppose. The starry cast members all acquit themselves nicely, as well, particularly Pfeiffer and Ridley.
It's old-fashioned entertainment with a very flashy overcoat — almost as flashy as Branagh's ridiculous, yet charming moustache. Not great, and likely not too pleasant for Agatha Christie obsessives, but fun enough. (PG-13 for violence and thematic elements; click here for showtimes at United Artists Amarillo Star 14, 8275 W. Amarillo Blvd., and Hollywood 16)
Chip Chandler is a digital content producer for Panhandle PBS. He can be contacted at Chip.Chandler@actx.edu, at @chipchandler1 on Twitter and on Facebook.
