M
artin McDonagh burst upon the American theater scene at the age of 28 when The Beauty Queen of Leenane, his first play, opened on Broadway in 1996 and ran there for 365 performances. Two decades later, he is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost playwrights of his generation. Hangmen, his latest play, was a hit in London and off Broadway last year and is expected to transfer to Broadway later this season. McDonagh has simultaneously pursued a parallel career in film, writing and directing In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012), and, most recently, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). All three have won critical acclaim, and Three Billboards, which received seven Oscar nominations, was modestly successful at the box office.
Youthful success is almost always followed sooner or later by a sharp negative reaction. In McDonagh’s case, it was finally triggered by the release of Three Billboards, whose characters include a psychopathically violent racist who appears at film’s end to have changed his brutal ways. Many progressive-minded critics, among them April Wolfe of the Village Voice, were offended by the suggestion that such a creature might be capable of a transformation as profound as the one he seems to undergo: “In some ways, watching this film is like reading those alt-right fashion profiles of Richard Spencer that insisted we overlook his campaign of quiet terror and find common ground with him.”
That an ostensibly serious critic could interpret Three Billboards in so rigidly reductive a way is, however, less a commentary on McDonagh’s film than a sign of the times. The underlying moral complexity of Three Billboards is alien to many younger moviegoers, who increasingly think it wrong for an artist not to make crystal-clear at all times which of his characters wear the black hat and which the white, and who judge art by the degree to which it accords with their own definitions of “black” and “white.” Not so McDonagh, who uses the graphic violence that is his trademark not to titillate the jaded but to shock his viewers into looking more closely at the world in which they live—a world about whose nature his own vision is singularly acute.
Born in London in 1970, McDonagh is the younger son of working-class Irish Catholic parents who moved to England to better themselves. Though he grew up in the midst of a self-consciously Irish culture and has set most of his plays in Ireland, he has never lived there. Similarly, he went to Catholic schools but lost his faith early on and dropped out at 16, thereafter educating himself by reading widely and watching plays on the BBC.
McDonagh was initially more interested in film than in theater, which he saw as “a middle-class art form…that I as a working-class person was cut out of.” But it was the stage for which he started writing, and he was already fully formed as an artist by the time The Beauty Queen of Leenane was premiered. Since then he has written eight more plays, four of which are set in Ireland. While three of the others take place elsewhere—Hangmen in England, The Pillowman (2003) in an unspecified totalitarian state, and A Behanding in Spokane (2010) in the U.S.—they are defined less by their settings than by their characters, who are indistinguishable from the demented blabbermouths who inhabit his Irish plays.
Whatever their nominal origins, most of McDonagh’s characters speak an ornate patois that is a savage parody of the clichés of stage Irishness (“Oi have me drunkard mammy to look after”). In addition, they are injustice collectors whose passion to settle old scores has been intensified to the point of rage by the closed-minded insularity of the communities in which they live. Typical of McDonagh’s flamboyant treatment of this latter theme is The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), a black comedy that portrays a cell of murderous Irish terrorists as a gaggle of drunken halfwits who love their pets more than their fellow men. By play’s end, the stage is slippery with blood and body parts—not to mention the battered corpses of two cats.
Terrorism is no laughing matter, yet nothing about The Lieutenant of Inishmore is more characteristic of McDonagh than the fact that it is a comedy. The play, which he says was inspired by “pacifist rage,” is a scalding-hot broth of contempt for the “stupid violence” of the IRA. His Ireland is no verdant Eden but a desperate land full of self-destructive sentimentalists who feed on embroidered memories and long-cherished grudges—and who slaughter innocent bystanders in the name of “the patriot game.” How best to tell the truth about such madness? McDonagh chooses to make fun of it: “Didn’t he outright cripple the poor fella laughed at that girly scarf he used to wear, and that was when he was 12?” “His first cousin, too, that fella was, never minding 12! And then pinched his wheelchair!”
Like all of McDonagh’s plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore is concerned with the corrupting power of vengefulness. That a playwright of Irish descent should be preoccupied with such a subject makes perfect sense, since the history of Ireland in the 20th century was a tale of religious and cultural irredentism run amok. But McDonagh casts his net wider, encompassing as well what one might call “spiritual irredentism.” In A Behanding in Spokane, the vengeful party is a homicidal maniac who has spent the past 47 years searching for his left hand, from which he was involuntarily separated by “six hillbilly bastards” who lived to regret their crime; in Hangmen, it is a mysterious stranger who torments a public executioner whom he believes to have hanged an innocent man. In Beauty Queen and The Lonesome West (1997), by contrast, the conflicts are between blood relatives who have come to despise one another. Yet whoever they are and wherever they live, they have in common the desire for vengeance and the willingness to obtain it by any means necessary, violence very much included.
Extreme though it is, McDonagh’s violence is never gratuitous, much less quasi-pornographic. It is used to dramatize a moral precept, which is that the consequences of violent acts, in particular those to which men resort when seeking revenge, can neither be foreseen nor controlled. In McDonagh’s world, violence is a train of powder that, once ignited, is prone to blow up the just and the unjust—not to mention the person who set it off.
This theme also dominates McDonagh’s feature films, though the first two, In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, are more conventional in approach than his stage plays. It had always been his ultimate goal to both write and direct his own films, not merely because he wanted to reach a wider, less class-bound audience but because, like Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder before him, he was determined to secure the artistic integrity of his work (“Part of the director’s job on a film is to protect the writer, so that’s half the battle”). But to achieve these goals, he was forced at first to make movies that fit more or less recognizably into the comic crime-film genre.
To be sure, In Bruges, the story of a pair of guilt-ridden Irish hitmen who hole up in Belgium after bungling a job, has serious overtones. It is set, for instance, in Bruges, a city full of cathedrals visited mainly by tourists, so as to hint at the effects of Europe’s loss of religious faith. Still, neither In Bruges nor Seven Psychopaths aspire in the end to being much more than formidably intelligent entertainment, bearing the same relationship to McDonagh’s stage plays that Graham Greene’s thrillers of the ’30s do to his more ambitious novels of spiritual malaise and distress.
Not so Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the first of McDonagh’s films to be directly comparable in both stylistic approach and moral gravity to his best plays. It is not, to begin with, a comedy, black or otherwise. Funny though it sometimes is, Three Billboards is set in motion by an event of the utmost foulness—the rape and murder of a teenage girl—and at no point does McDonagh play that hideous occurrence for laughs. To the contrary, Three Billboards is centered on Mildred, the dead girl’s mother (played with gaunt and horrific force by Frances McDormand), who refuses to accept that her killer cannot be found and punished.
To goad the local police into solving the crime, Mildred rents three billboards located on the outskirts of the small town in rural Missouri where she lives, using them to post a message accusing Ebbing’s police chief (Woody Harrelson) of having failed to do his duty. By doing so, she enrages Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an ill-educated, black-hating uniformed thug, who thereupon commits a series of violent acts that lead to his firing. A spiral of reciprocal bloodshed ensues that threatens to tear Ebbing apart, at the height of which Mildred joins forces with Dixon in order to hunt down, vigilante-style, her daughter’s killer. But Three Billboards does not end there. Instead, Mildred and Dixon seem to have a change of heart just before the final blackout:
MILDRED: You sure about this?
DIXON: About killing this guy? Not really. You?
MILDRED: Not really. I guess we can decide along the way.
What has happened to them? McDonagh plants a clue when, early in the film, we see another character reading Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. This is not merely a touch of local color but a signal to the viewer that Three Billboards will be a secular counterpart of O’Connor’s stories about the operation of divine grace, a narrative conditioned by McDonagh’s own early exposure to the Roman Catholic dogma that he would later reject but never forget. In Christian theology (and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), grace is “the free and unmerited favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners.” The recipients of such grace may choose to reject it—a decision that in O’Connor’s stories can lead to dire consequences ranging from self-mutilation to first-degree murder—but they are changed by it nonetheless.
Anyone familiar with A Good Man Is Hard to Find will realize at once that Three Billboards is cut from the same cloth. Nowhere in the film does McDonagh suggest that the path of the regenerate is anything but stony. As O’Connor wrote, “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” In the case of Mildred no less than Dixon, this pain arises from the knowledge that both characters must abandon all hope of avenging Mildred’s daughter in order to break the endless cycle of vengeance and reprisal and start anew. Nor can we be sure that either of them will succeed in doing so. All we know is that hate has crippled their souls, and that they are now willing at last to consider—however tentatively—another way to live.
It is easy to see why so many people dislike Three Billboards. To begin with, it is no more realistic a portrayal of everyday life in rural Missouri than The Lieutenant of Inishmore is of the activities of the IRA. It is, rather, a parable, one in which reality is simplified and exaggerated, almost in the manner of a stage play, so as to more clearly depict the spiritual redemption that is its subject. For this reason, those who are unreceptive to the anti-naturalistic illusional techniques of theater are no more likely to appreciate Three Billboards.
“Woke” critics who view art through the prism of politics, by contrast, dislike the film because it fails to treat the plight of Mildred and Dixon as a “teachable moment” from which we are expected to learn that the human heart can only be cleansed of racism by way of political reeducation—a notion that could not have been further from McDonagh’s mind. The intensity with which some of these critics have attacked Three Billboards suggests that they are irredentists of yet another sort, power-seeking idealists who believe that their opponents are, like Dixon, too evil to be capable of redemption and therefore must not be debated on even terms but silenced by force majeure.
All this notwithstanding, Three Billboards was mostly received with enthusiasm by critics and audiences alike, much more so than one might reasonably expect of so serious-minded a film. What is more, its popular success, coupled with the warm public response to the plays that preceded it, leads me to suspect that its maker may come in time to be seen as the great dramatic poet of our angry age of tribalism. Having seen in his youth how tribal rivalry splintered the Irish soul, Martin McDonagh now writes plays and directs films of slangy eloquence and ugly beauty in which he seeks to persuade the rest of us to follow a more benign path—while we can.
