Do the Right Thing in Ebbing, Missouri

Rating: 10/10 (24 November 2017)

It takes not only a considerable amount of skill to match deep-dark- heartbreaking dramatic storytelling and characters with a pitchðŸ˜¨black comic edge; to go the extra mile one should hopefully have a voice. Martin McDonaugh may be mistaken too quickly as having made a Coen brothers film - Frances McDormand being there doesn't help assuage that argument - yet through In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths he's shown his acidic, no bullish*t, I see clichÃ©s for what they are and raise you a subversion original voice in writing and an assured hand in direction. He also casts his movies like nobody's business and from McDormand down to Sam Rockwell and Sam Rockwell's mom to the actress as Angela Hayes having one scene, he has everyone with fresh, Thanksgiving-buffet-plate meat to chew on.
While it's one of the best films of the year, I'm sure if I try, more or less, I can find some nitpick or even flaws - the daughter Hayes scene could be one simply for the final two lines mother and daughter have, I understand the point but it's too far on the nose, especially for this artist; another could be how quickly "f***head" Rockwell comes around to a kind-of-sort-of-maybe redemption in the third act - but all of this is overshadowed by the giant moral and social-political-emotional scope of everything else. Mildred Hayes is one of those movie characters that, male or female (but especially make), stays with you for not so much how balls they are but how marvelled they are by their own ballsiness.
McDormand has such a command of the character in the big moments - those trailer bits that, if ones been going to the movies this year, has been overplayed (though luckily practically all of the major story points aren't revealed) - one may miss a moment like when Mildred realizes a character did something horrible that she punished someone else for, or how she looks after a tough a-hole comes into her shop coming face to face with a threatening countenance. She's played so many people who carry an ocean of complexity but whats appealing is how she carries a lot of it without needing to show much. Hell, one beat where she has her two animal slippers on their feet talk in bold violent terms is among the great acting moments of the year.
So how relevant is it to now? I mention Do the Right Thing because not so much it having the same dramatic build up so much as it has a similar anger - no sorry not true, boiling, scornful rage - at how segments of our country have been, are and may always be (the mother of Rockwell is one such character who inspires such rage at least for me, and she is just your average white-bread matriarch. Also like Lee's film it shows a community who are inextricably linked, and at times the stark racism is almost like a bad joke (Rockwell's cop being a torturer of black inmates, if not more than one, is almost a goof; he's akin to the John Tururro type in DtRT, a man who just is what he is and it's too late to change now, so everyone looks at Mildred in this story and her whole billboards "thing" closer to something like a basic acting-out in grief than a howl for justice. And then when it comes time for a new man to come in to the town's police force, and I won't say how or why, and id rather you just see it than me put in the spoiler marker, it is like a cold bath of irony: the genuinely tough, decent, on top of it older black man.
This is as towering a script as we may get in American cinema this year, and if it has imperfections it shouldn't matter much. The central idea here is such: if you don't bring a light on stark injustice, people wont do much if nothing else because it's not on their mind or (frankly) in their own interests. Willoughby says at one point the billboards are a "chess move." What is the "king" to take then? The ending of the film may seem to leave things too open-ended for some, and I get that. To me, the end is that there's never an ending when it comes to looking at rape (which is assault) and other violence (which is more directly assault) there is no clear ending. You can kill yourself, sure, but that doesn't solve much for those who have to live in total pain. I love this!