Trying to keep up with Judge Roy Moore in the category of corrupting minors, I saw with my favorite 14-year-old another movie for mature audiences, this time Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. If you own a tv that you turn on, you probably know the basic plot elements and that the film has a large advertising budget. It's stylish to be cynical about hyped Hollywood rollouts, and I would not be above trying to land a few sucker punches if there was an opening, but Three Billboards is such a good movie that I slipped in that last sentence and called it a film.
In order not to give away more than the advertisements do, I'm going to focus on the atmospherics instead of what happens. In almost the first scene, the Frances McDormand character walks into the rental office of a billboard company and interrupts the agent, who is reading a book. As an English major, I'm always interested in what people are reading, and usually it's disappointing. In this case, however, the agent is reading A Good Man is Hard to Find, the first collection of stories by Flannery O'Connor, about whom I've written here and here. So . . . American south, violence, dark humor, misshapen characters, and a religious theme. Check, check, check, check, and check.
That title--A Good Man is Hard to Find--is somewhat more colorful than, say, The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. It's also the title of one of the stories in that first collection, maybe one that O'Connor or her publisher particularly esteemed since it "got the cover." The story features a nice but daft and over comfortable southern grandma who is full of wisdom that doesn't quite come up to the level of conventional. At a roadside restaurant, she and the proprietor agree that, these days, a good man is hard to find. The platitude, and she is full of them, signals their limitations, but by the time the story ends meanings have deepened and the platitude signals the limitations of all humanity. A good man is hard to find, O'Connor would say, because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. She is a kind of fanatic who puts opposite Christian faith a large gaping void of nothing--nihilism in Latin, and the story ends, chillingly, with a mass murderer admonishing a laughing accomplice who is rolling a dead body in a ditch:
"Shut up, Bobby Lee," the Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
The story has for me the fascination of what's appalling and, being fascinated, I may be naturally inclined to think that writer and director Martin McDonagh had in mind not just O'Connor but this particular fiction of hers. It's the McDormand character who is sunk in the yawning hole and surrounded by no-good men. In one of the more memorable scenes, she gobs spit on the Catholic church when the priest, in the role of the voice of the fallen community, comes calling. He is culpable. She uses the word, which seems a little unnatural for her, around six times in her brutal assessment of him and his church. There is also a midget and an alcoholic ex who has taken up with a teen-ager. In an overheard detail, we learn that the teen-ager's new job involves a horse riding enterprise for cripples. It's Flannery O'Connor's world, including the way there is operating in the brokenness something else, a possibility of grace, with the result that in the last scene the two most hopeless characters are driving to Idaho to kill someone--unless, being changed people, they decide not to.
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