A tale that takes an unexpected turn

     

   Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who appeared together in In Bruges (2008), reunite in The Banshees of Inisherin, the story of two former friends living on a fictional island off the coast of Ireland.

   Martin McDonagh, who directed In Bruges, locates Banshees'  characters on an island where the residents seem to regard the mainland as if it were another world. It is: Engulfed by civil war, Ireland feels more than a boat ride away from isolated Inisherin.

    A simple conceit drives the story. Once best friends, Gleeson's Colm suddenly and without explanation stops talking to Farrell's Padraic. We suspect that Padraic committed some terrible slight. He must have done something.

    That's not the case. Colm refuses to acknowledge Padraic's existence for no apparent reason at all.

    Faced with loneliness and beset by consternation, Padraic won't take "no" for an answer. Again and again, he presses Colm to explain his sudden change of heart.

     Eventually, Colm, an obstinate rock of a man, tells Padraic’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) that his former pal, is just too dull for sustained companionship.

      Siobhan counters. Padraic always has been dull so why shun the poor fellow now?

      Farrell excels as the good-hearted and insistently sincere Padraic, a guy whose social milieu consists of his farm and animals, most notably a pet donkey called Jenny.

    Padraic gives Jenny access to the cottage he shares with his sister, which -- not unexpectedly -- annoys her.  Siobhan yearns for better things and bristles under the weight of her island confinement.

     Later, we learn that Colm -- despite his stoicism and silent smoking -- is fighting a losing battle. Facing his own mortality, he realizes that he has accomplished nothing. He wants to devote the rest of his life to writing music for the fiddle he plays with a few other musicians at the town pub, the only place on Inisherin that accommodates any public gatherings.

      With the clock ticking, Colm has no time for distractions.

      At first, McDonagh seems to have made another movie steeped in colorful turns of phrase and Irish rue. But hints of darkness soon cast  a bit of a pall over the proceedings.

       The local policeman (Gary Lydon) sadistically abuses his son Dominic (Barry Keoghan). An old woman (Sheila Flitton) makes pronouncements of doom.

       The supporting actors excel, although Condon -- as the short-tempered, literate, and essentially decent Siobhan -- proves exceptional. Siobhan realizes that sustained isolation leads to unbearable desperation.

      The landscapes of Inisherin are stark, the ocean forbidding, and just about every aspect of life feels irrevocably meager.

      When the movie takes its darkest turns, we realize that McDonagh has serious intentions. In a fit of understated rage, an increasingly frustrated Colm pledges that every time Padraic talks to him, Colm will chop off one of his own fingers. 

        I won't tell you how the story arrives at its chastening conclusion but McDonagh takes us to places we hardly could have anticipated when the movie began.

        Fine performances and McDonagh's commitment to the odd edges of his material enables The Banshees of Inisherin to amuse, shock, and get under the skin, a bitter Irish chill of a movie.

        But more than an expression of Irish parochialism, this quasi-folk tale shows how tragic results can spring from something that borders on the trivial, irreparably altering the way life stumbles onward when something happens that can’t be made right.

McDormand bristles in 'Three Billboards'

In the town of Ebbing, Missouri, things aren't going well.

Mildred Hayes doesn't brood. After her daughter was raped and murdered on a stretch of lonely Missouri highway, Mildred ran out of patience with the local police for failing to locate a suspect and make an arrest. Mildred took matters into her own hands, renting three rundown billboards outside of her hometown of Ebbing, painting them red and advertising the fact that the police chief dropped the ball.

"Raped While Dying." "And Still No Arrests" "How Come Chief Willoughby?"

Mildred's bold move upsets the police and the townsfolk of Ebbing, Mo. But here's the thing: Mildred doesn't give a damn who she offends. She's angry, grief-stricken and intent on obtaining justice for her departed daughter.

Director Martin McDonagh's often funny third feature, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, brings the British/Irish director to the American heartland for a movie that proudly displays its wild variations in tone. Three Billboards makes its mark as a genre farrago: it's a dark comedy, a profane assault on authority figures, a diatribe about small-town hypocrisies and a comedy built around characters whose speech boils with profanities.

Frances McDormand receives showcase space from McDonagh as Mildred, a woman who spreads her venom the way bees pollinate flowers -- liberally. No one is spared: not the terminally ill Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), not Mildred's son (Lucas Hedges), not her former husband (John Hawkes), an unreliable fellow who left her for a 19-year-old (Samara Weaving), and certainly not police officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a dim-bulb of a cop with a vicious streak and a reputation for racism.

The British born McDonagh (In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) occasionally seems to be straining to hit notes of political incorrectness as he reveals the blatant homophobia and racism of some of his characters. But touching moments and genuine expressions of feeling also turn up as characters are brought face-to-face with their humanity -- often under terrible circumstances.

Whatever its ambitions, Three Billboards derives its charge to McDormand; Mildred is so furiously committed to her own truth that she doesn't hesitate to provoke, even tossing the local priest out of her home. Of course, Mildred's language proves significantly less polite than a simple invitation for the priest to leave.

The movie's intemperate characters sometimes soften: A bit of homespun wisdom emerges from an unlikely source or a touch of decency is expressed by a character such as Rockwell's Dixon, a comic-book-reading cop who may be too stupid to know how thoroughly reprehensible he can be.

To keep everything slightly off balance, McDonagh sometimes mixes brutal and tender sentiments in the same scene. His approach creates ragged edges, but, like his main character, McDonagh may not care. Three Billboards takes its cues from McDormand, who infuses Mildred with uncompromising strength, the kind that allows a formidable woman to go toe-to-toe with any man and strike fear into his trembling heart. She marches to her own drummer and is more than ready to knock down anyone who stands in her way.

One psychopath too many?

A movie that criticizes itself as it goes along, but is most notable for its wild performances.

Generally speaking, one psychopath should be enough for any movie. That rule, however, doesn't apply if you're writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) and you're determined to make movie devoted to the principle that nothing succeeds like excess.

To say that Seven Psychopaths is over-plotted misses the point because the point is a ton of over-plotting that propels a large cast of characters through one wild scenario after another.

To keep the movie percolating, McDonagh has hired an ace cast of oddball actors: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken, all of whom have plenty of offbeat credibility.

The result is a Los Angeles-based movie that hums along, dropping in stories within stories, tying them all together in scenes that take place in the desert and find the characters debating over how to conduct a proper gun battle.

Farrell plays Marty, a screenwriter who has a title for movie -- Seven Psychopaths -- but no story to go with it. His pal Billy (Rockwell) seems to know a good deal about psychopathy and offers to help.

As it turns out, Billy runs a dog-stealing racket with his buddy Hans (Walken), a strangely philosophical fellow whose wife (Linda Bright Clay) has been hospitalized for cancer.

Harrelson enters the story as a mobster whose dog -- a Shih Tzu named Bonny -- has been stolen by Billy.

The screenplay makes room for appearances by Harry Dean Stanton (as a Quaker who's trying to avenge his daughter's death); Long Nguyen (as a Vietcong veteran seeking revenge for the May Lai massacre), and Tom Waits (as a guy who -- along with his girlfriend -- played by Amanda Warren -- sets out to eliminate as many serial killers as possible). Did I mention that Waits appears in almost all of his scenes carrying a bunny?

True to its hip nature, the movie contains dollops of self-criticism. At one point, Hans complains about the the way women tend to be shortchanged in these kinds of movies. Too bad he's right because one of these women is Abbie Cornish, who plays the girlfriend who junks Marty early in the film. Gabourey Sidibe (familiar from Precious) has a cameo as a woman Harrelson's character tries to blame for losing his dog.

For once, it's not Walken who gives the movie's most outrageous performance. That honor goes to Rockwell, who's playing a wacked-out guy with enough lose screws to fill ten trash pails. That's not to say that Waken doesn't quietly walk off with his share of scenes, probably because he's smart enough not to try to out-wacko Rockwell.

Seven Psychopaths is fun -- until it isn't, and it requires a high tolerance for self-conscious writing, for performances that try a bit too hard to be outlandish and for the kind of movie-mad post-modernism that makes its hipness as difficult to ignore as a loud tie.

McDonagh's movie can be seen as a satirical take on violent genre movies, as a violent genre movie or as a movie that, in its best moments, makes you laugh in spite of yourself.