R-E-S-P-E-C-T

 When Dr. King said we had to learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish like fools, he was speaking to the America of the Jim Crow era. This year marks a half a century since his assassination and, doesn’t it just feel like we’re going down that road of fools?! This utter lack of respect for one’s fellow citizen is really the unintended theme of the movie Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri, written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It is hard to find a movie more filled with derision for every marginalized group in America: women, black people, gay people, people with dwarfism. Many might have passed on the movie had McDonagh’s film not  received a Best Picture and 6 other Academy Award nominations and already won the Best Motion Picture Drama at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Cast Ensemble award, among others. This is a travesty and a sign of the times.

Martin McDonagh has brought foul-mouthed, ugly-souled bigots to the screen before in dark comedies like In Bruges or Seven Psychopaths (and this director must have something against short stature people, because he derides them in In Bruges as well). The lead characters in those movies, however, were extremely violent mob criminals (Bruges) or, well, psychopaths! In Three Billboards, the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and just plain detestable people are the everyday folk of a small rural town in America: the mother of a young woman who was raped, the father, the police officers, the dentist, the high school kids, you name it. Was there a message here from this white Englishman?

The basic plot of the film has been all over the internet. Frances McDormand, who plays Mildred the mother of a young woman brutally raped, killed and whose body was burned, decides she can’t wait for the local police to take any more time finding her daughter’s killers and puts up three billboards to try to light a fire under the police chief, played by Woody Harrelson, and his incredibly incompetent police officers, including one Officer Dixon, a violent, distasteful, hate filled bigot and fool, played by Sam Rockwell. McDormand and Rockwell have already won Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards for their roles, which are the central ones in the story.

 

Sam Rockwell as Officer Jason Dixon and Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes 

Mildred and Dixon spend most of the movie showing us just how heartless and cruel people can be or become. The disturbing thing is that these two characters are not the “bad guys” of the film. It would be nothing new to have people shown as ruthless, but the director here is actually going for us to feel sympathy for Mildred and forgiveness for Dixon, who McDonagh makes go through some weird form of redemption in the film.

Mildred, in her “quest for justice” (we suppose this is what the billboards represent) is completely detached and unfeeling towards her much suffering son, disparages the family-loving chief of police who is dying of cancer, insults and harms the dentist (a fat man; fat people are also mocked and ridiculed by McDonagh in In Bruges), compares the Catholic church to a criminal street gang –and all its priests are either pedophiles or pedophile enablers- recklessly damages the town, and foul-mouths just about everyone else in the movie. How to feel sympathy for such a woman? You may think her ruthlessness is a result of her daughter’s brutal murder, but in the only scene where we see her with her daughter still alive, one where they are arguing over a ride to a date, Mildred responds to her daughter’s “I hope I get raped” with a “I hope you get raped too!” Such a detestable line between a mother and her daughter could only have been written into a screenplay by a man. 

That piece of dialogue isn’t even the worst in the film, as bad as it is.  I need to transcribe part of the one that is, and I note that I am not, of course, transcribing the N word, but these white characters certainly did use it in the movie:

MILDRED:  So how’s it all going in the N*****- torturing business, Dixon?

DIXON: It’s ‘Persons of color’-torturing business, these days, if you want to know. (…)

DIXON (to the Chief of Police): She said ‘N*****-torturing’. I said you can’t say ‘N*****-torturing’ no more. You gotta say ‘Persons-of-color’ torturing. Right?

Was this supposed to be one of the “darkly hilarious” scenes, as some critics have found the film to be?! Remember, it’s not the slave master using the N word in a movie that takes place in the 19^th century, it’s the modern day “suffering” mother, the one for whom we’re supposed to feel sympathy, talking to two police officers.

I guess McDonagh is one of those people of our degraded times that embraces living in a “post politically-correct” era.  Mildred’s son –the nice, suffering young man in the movie- calling his mother and sister “c**ts” is probably just him using “locker room talk” to this director. The one Latino in the film is called a “beaner”. The black actors in the movie are like props, none of their characters are developed. The great actor Peter Dinklage, of Game of Thrones fame, plays a character whose only purpose in the movie is to be the butt of the “midget” jokes. Hard to understand why he would accept this role.

 

Frances McDormand as Mildren and Peter Dinkglage as James

People in the theater laughed in some of these openly racist, misogynistic and just plain distasteful scenes. It is the sign of the times. When the current occupant of the White House is the first to disrespect people, referring to all the nations in the African continent as “s***holes”, calling citizens of Mexico “rapists”, saying of women he’d “grab them by the p****”, publicly mocking people with disabilities, disrespecting Native Americans, banning Muslims, and more, how to be surprised by this film director or the many awards his film is accruing? Too many Americans actually say they like how the President “speaks his mind.” What they are saying is that they agree with the racist, misogynist and hate-filled content and they want to “speak their minds” like this as well. McDonagh has spoken his in this screenplay and film.

One message to them: Respect!  Or perish like fools.

When Times Get Rough

Around the time I wrote the Beatriz at Dinner post last year, life threw me a curve ball. I didn’t duck on time. I was left stunned and unable to write. So, I turned off the lights and my blog went silent.

But I never stopped going to the movies. Surviving by film literally became what I did.

When the person whose been by your side for thirty-seven years suddenly leaves his half of the bed empty, when relationships you’ve had since you were old enough to talk get tangled in knots impossible to unravel, and you find yourself in a country where everything that is wrong is overtaking what should be, in this up-side down world of the new Demogorgons, there is still that big screen. The lights dim, the excitement of being transported away from everything that is troubling or scary or sad runs through your veins, and there they are: the films you love. For when times get rough.

 I would like to break my silence with five marvelous films that have brought different elements of understanding, solace, and wonder to my life: Gullermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco, and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. These films excel in all aspects. They are directed with tremendous creativity and mastery; the cinematography, set design, score and especially the acting in all the films are extraordinary, and maybe most of all they touch on issues, provide insights, and bring forth positive values and hope to probably some of the darkest times this nation has faced in years.

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour, by the director of one of my favorite romance movies, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, is the story of how close the British Empire came to caving to Nazi Germany and the variables that led Winston Churchill, played majestically by Gary Oldman, to resist by using the spirit of freedom and courage of its everyday citizens, the true heroes of World War II, changing the course of history. 

It is the soldiers that willingly gave their lives in Calais, the civilians who brought home the soldiers from Dunkirk, the men and women who withstood the blitz and were willing to persist that bring the tears to your eyes in Joe Wright’s masterful telling of this dark hour.  It is an inspiring film that speaks to leadership, made all the more striking as we live through these times where it is so lacking.

Christopher Plummer as John Paul Getty in All the Money in the World

In All the Money in the World, Ridley Scott has impressively opened the doors to an understanding or, at the very least, a glimpse of the minds of people who are born to wealth and for whom wealth has become a disease of the soul. Again, a parable to our times where greed has overtaken human compassion and empathy, where billionaires aspire to trillions while destroying the welfare, health and lives of many ordinary folk. The film uses the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson as the story by which to represent the slow dehumanization to which these dangerous levels of greed lead.

Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg in All the Money in the World

Christopher Plummer and Ridley Scott both showed how experienced artists are able to do something as impressive as re-shoot 22 scenes in nine days, which Scott chose to do after the sexual harassment allegations against Kevin Spacey, who originally played Getty. Scott  stands out in any genre film he chooses to direct and always brings out the best in his collaborators, in this film that includes Michelle Williams and even rather unexceptional actors like Mark Wahlberg.

Bria Vinaite as Halley and Brooklyn Prince as Moonee in The Florida Project

At the other end of the wealth spectrum we find The Florida Project, which depicts the hopeless and abandoned poor in America, personified in the abandoned children we follow through a neighborhood in Florida. Director Sean Baker, who excels at bringing the marginal worlds of this nation to the screen, like he previously did so well in his film Tangerine about a transgender sex worker, shot entirely with iPhone smartphones, in this film takes us into the life of Moonee, a six-year-old girl and her single mother, Halley, who are just barely surviving in a budget motel near the Disney empire. Moonee and her friends run free and wild through these motels and abandoned houses, full of low-income families in a permanent state of transition.

Willem Dafoe and Brooklyn Prince in The Florida Project

This is more than just poverty in America, it is despair. Halley embodies the product of a society that has ceased to care about its citizens, leaving them to a day-by-day existence, where the world is pretty much reduced to a room in a motel, alcohol, drugs, anger and desolation. Willem Dafoe has been praised for his role as Bobby, the manager at the motel, although both Brooklyn Prince, who plays Moonee, and Bria Vinaite, who is Halley, are just as impressive or maybe more so. Bobby is sort of the remnant of a time where compassion and empathy towards those less fortunate was a little more prevalent, or at least where concern for the welfare of children still existed. But even Bobby, with all his good intentions, is faced with the very real and inevitable outcome for Moonee and her mother.

I’ve left the two films full of hopefulness for last. At a time when democrats in Congress are fighting for “dreamers” to remain in the country where they’ve grown, and are opposing the monstrosity that would be a wall with Mexico, Disney pictures released their most recent animated film: Coco, which takes place in just this neighbor country. Luckily the heads at Disney were wise in choosing a stellar Latino cast for the voices of Coco and his family, turned to Latino consultants for the screenplay, and used a Latino director to co-direct a movie that brings the beauty of Mexican traditions and values to the screen in a high quality artistic and moving way. 

Anthony Gonzales as the voice of  Miguel and Ana Ofelia Murguía as the voice of Mamá Coco in Coco

Will it give some of the racist supporters of this administration’s immigration policies pause? Who knows. It is a film that melts hearts, but one can’t help but wonder if those who support the current administration even have one. It did, in any case, not only melt mine but made me once again so proud to be Latina, ready to stand up for the beautiful cultures to the south of the Rio Grande, some of which are now part of this diverse nation to the North. Basing themselves on Mexican art and traditions, Coco exalts the values of honoring family and tradition, respecting our elders, carrying and caring for those loved ones that are no longer with us. It does this through music, art, and undying love.

Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer in The Shape of Water

The best for last. The Shape of Water. A caveat: you will love this movie if you love Guillermo del Toro movies. Del Toro is a singular artist who happens to love monsters. “Well –he’s said- the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.” His characters in many movies are inter-species and he braves the boundaries of the “normal”. In his films, the true monsters - those dark, dangerous, violent things we traditionally call monsters- are the human beings incapable of humanity. They are Vidal, the fascist general in Pan’s Labyrinth, or Richard Strickland, the government agent in The Shape of Water. Del Toro also blurs the lines between reality and a world of magic, sometimes supernatural, sometimes science fiction, always splendorous in its details and imagination, reaffirming that there is so much more to our world than meets the eye. He is the director of magical realism in film.

Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water, like Pan’s Labyrinth before it, has at its core a heroine who appears to all as someone society considers “weak”, but who proves, through the strength of her love, that she is just the person to overpower the forces of darkness contained in the authoritarian, fascist-like figures that are the men-monsters in these movies. In Pan’s that was the young girl Ofelia, stepdaughter to the fascist Vidal, and in The Shape of Water it is Eliza, a mute cleaning woman, played brilliantly by Sally Hawkins, who confronts Strickland.

There are people in our modern world that want to reduce us to flat, one-dimensional individuals, easily stereotyped, stockpiled in binary, polarized boxes. For these people, almost everyone is completely dispensable. Del Toro’s movie demonstrates the fallacy of their proposition, how impossible it is given how very complex humans really are, how infinite our world and our imagination can be, and how through friendship and love we can break all imposed boundaries and not only resist, but become the remarkable beings we were created to be.