What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together.
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Three Billboards outside Ebbing was made a long while after Fahrenheit 451, which fails to explain why its writer/director also denies the death of the written word.
Best witness to this defiance is the cancer-suffering sheriff (Woody Harrelson) who posts back humanity-embracing love letters to arrive after his suicide.
At the same time, in a plot that often asserts the brutal shortness of life, Martin McDonagh allows a small tortoise – the kind you remember from childhood – to retain a covert hint of immortality. The suggestion has to be latent when you tend to die in a shoebox over winter. But if you still identify with Torty, what an endless joy it is to crawl across the lap of a middle-aged human female without disturbing her equally endless – and joyless – alcoholic stupor. Not the person she might have been then. Worse than that, she never gets the last-minute moral break given to her son, the moral vacuum of a deputy sheriff (Sam Rockwell) whose own life is finally transformed by the sheriff’s posthumous guidance and love.
How Frances McDormand, as a guilt-ridden, revenge-obsessed mother, competes with all this is hard to know. The answer, of course, is that she isn’t competing at all but simply doing her thing – remaining central to everything without being either “merely” supportive or an over-entitled diva. A true and wonderful mystery to be sure. And McDormand repeats the achievement in Nomadland – but more on that later.
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The late Harry Dean Stanton, despite a lifetime’s contribution to cinema and the arts, does seem fated to remain forever a “support” act, however all-American that might be. There is, however, a notable exception to this in his penultimate film, Lucky (John Carroll Lynch, 2017). It’s a quiet celebration of the actor, singer, ex-marine, and the old man. If there is any filmic premise, it might be that “ordinary” and “extraordinary” no longer seem so very distinct when you’re approaching ninety. This means that – unlike their response to Three Billboards – viewers aren’t left wondering whether this is “reality-based.” In fact, it’s a sense of everyday reality that stays recognizable, even while the director’s surrealist-inclined father, David, sits in a corner of Lucky’s/Harry’s favourite bar – enjoying, one feels, his chance to escape every known species of hyper-artiness.
I don’t know who thought to bring in the tortoise here. It’s a fairly large desert tortoise who clearly doesn’t mind coming on at the beginning and end to straggle onward under a harsh desert sun and – with absolutely no wasted effort – demonstrate again the power of metaphor. Another support act. But when you’re known for carrying the entire cosmos on your back, who needs official credits? It’s enough surely just to do the job of pointing your entire being toward an unfashionable but palpable glory – the deep commonality of shared creatureliness.
This is a universality that feels even deeper than, for example, the camaraderie so vital to soldiers in battle – perhaps even deeper than the shared experiences of a species now enduring global warming and a viral pandemic.
What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together.
Some wonderfully strong notions of Everyman – and Everywoman – famously surfaced in the books and films of the mid-20th century. But the best of these – idealistic as they were – don’t shy away from moral complexity. Examples help. John Baxter’s film of the book and play Love on the Dole (1941) was made before Pearl Harbour, indeed before the war itself became anything but “phony.” Its end titles – which still retain a lot of their rhetorical force – urge a community-based fight against community-destroying economic collapse. But what we actually remember are the film’s graphic depictions of the economically driven moral compromises forced on everyone, without exception.
Love on the Dole, for British viewers especially, throws a grenade into a tradition of class stereotypes made all the more unrealistic by what looks, now, like a perverse determination to use only the poshest actors to cast every “working-class” part. In stark contrast, Baxter’s production, most notably where the women of the town have to pawn their bed linen, reminds some sharp-eyed modern film students of Italian neorealism. Technically, of course, this lay several years ahead: the same pawning of bed linen occurs as a striking set piece in de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. And there’s the same hammering at our nerves when we watch the relentless degradation of a decent central character. In this case it’s the desperate would-be sign-poster, Antonio, himself driven to stealing a bicycle when his is taken.
For those who know the film, Antonio is unforgettably played by amateur actor Lamberto Maggiorani; yet Maggiorani went on to fulfill only the negative stereotypes of Everyman – returning to working-class obscurity, reduced below the level of supporting roles to occasional work as an extra.
Deborah Kerr – as Sal, a working-class girl whose whole family depends on her earnings as “housekeeper” to the town’s wealthiest bookmaker – won’t often be compared to Lamberto Maggiorani; and the contrast in their careers could hardly be greater: the Italian labourer was, indeed, Everyman but only in the Andy Warhol sense; whereas Deborah Kerr – around twenty years old at the time of Love on the Dole – was a middle-class girl already on her second big feature.
As the “headstrong” Sally Hardcastle, a “strange” girl even to her own mother, Kerr has to convince us of her character’s situation and make it sympathetic enough to count as a British Everywoman, however tortured and tainted she might be. “We have to face things as they are, not as we’d like them to be.”
For all the moral ambiguity – and probably because of it – Kerr’s performance not only impressed home audiences but won many admirers in America. Such instant success on both sides of the Atlantic might not be unique, but it is special enough to warrant a moment’s pause.
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In Love on the Dole, Kerr’s portrait of quiet desperation is allied to a very steely resourcefulness. and it’s this that takes me back to more recent times. In particular it takes me to Frances McDormand as “Fern” in Nomadland, a much-praised 2020 film by Chloe Zhao.
Nonetheless, amid all the plaudits, one gets a distinct sense of critical confusion; yet for Zhao, this is actually a plaudit in itself: this is one director who absolutely does not want to be understood, especially if that means boxing up her films, tying them with a pretty ribbon and filling her house with awards.
What she does want is to show social reality, warts and all, with no suspicious – not to mention lying – insistence on moral uplift. So, in Nomadland, as in Baxter’s Love on the Dole despite its inspirational end titles, things are definitely not as we’d like them to be.
Like Sally, Fern will never be a candidate for candy-sweet saint-of-the-month. In fact, Zhao and McDormand make you wait pretty much to the end of the feature to achieve anything like a clear view of what this modern Everywoman is all about.
Without over-describing things and for the sake of those yet to see it, Fern is never reduced to one of those people who simply refuse to get along with others. On the contrary. She is part of a self-respecting community who happen to live and work on the road – and, by the way, who choose this path without necessarily becoming slaves to the broader gig economy. In other words, these are people as real as you and me, whose company you might gladly renew, if or when you meet up again. See you down the road, Fern!
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films discussed.
