Gossip is funny sometimes: Three Billboards + Fleabag

So the dumbest, only of interest to British writer-stans gossip is that Phoebe Waller-Bridges, the writer and star of the show Fleabag (which showed on Amazon in the states) left her husband for Martin McDonagh, critically acclaimed playwright and occasionally wonderful filmmaker (In Bruges) when he's not making bad Tarantino ripoffs (see, Three Billboards, Seven Psychopaths).

What is extra funny about this coupling is judging by their latest works -- Fleabag & the Oscar-tipped Three Billboards, a movie so groaningly and badly written in so many ways that I will DETAIL it to you -- they are perfect for each other, because neither of them know what it's like to actually have someone die in your life, because to their plot-addled minds, death is just a reason for plot!

Spoilers ahead, of course.

So the thing about Fleabag is that it is this small TV show based on a play, that's a monologue by this 30ish lady, "Fleabag," who is running a failing coffeeshop that she used to own with her best friend, until her best friend killed herself in the stupidest way possible, wandering, despondent, into a bike lane where a speedy biker hit her and a giant crash occured; and she's having a lot of sex in weird, reckless ways that just seem like she's not very discerning for a British person. She's constantly joking and kind of annoying (relatable!) and has a tortured relationship with her sister, her dad, and her stepmother (who is kind of awful).

Towards the end of the series, we get the answer to what makes Fleabag run? Why is she the way she is? Why are her feelings around sex maybe kind of self-destructive and weird? WELL GUYS, it's this: her mom had died of breast cancer (the timeline isn't so clear in this case), and Fleabag, who loves sex, kinda ... banged her best friend's boyfriend. Was it recklessness in the fact of grief? Was it because he was the only hot person in England? Did she maybe think that her best friend wouldn't react to it like the world's most idiotic drama queen? Well! Who the heck knows! Essentially, the voice was there with Fleabag - fair, considering its theatrical source - but the actual plotting assumed that everyone involved was truly dumb and mean and not actually a person. And it made me very angry, after spending several hours with Fleabag, to be so cheaply played by the end of the television series!

Naturally, she has a career after this, which makes me kind of mad. She wrote Fleabag as if she'd never actually known anyone who died, and definitely played on the idea that losing your mom makes you into a self-destrtislut, which ... I wish!

Now Three Billboards is even worse. McDonagh, who annoyingly resembles Hot Sting, has written some things that are good. I have thought a lot about what makes McDonagh and his brother, John Martin McDonagh (who did Calvary, one of my favorite films), good when they want to be and it's applying this kind of great, grand matters of life and death upon quotidian, arguably goofy set-ups. A minor-key, mid 90s Tarantino film plus Catholic guilt gains meaning and relevance in a way that it wouldn't as just a shoot 'em up. But when these guys falter, they just make exceedingly dumb shoot 'em ups. The follow up to Calvary was a bad cops film called War on Everybody, which was set in America and about corruption or something, and Three Billboards has a similar problem.

I mean, many critics have pointed it out but it's obvious that the McDonagh brothers don't have much of an opinion of America. I think their vision of it is like the fat tourist Americans in In Bruges -

But what gets me about Three Billboards -- beyond the easy, casual racism which better critics than I have pointed out -- is how freaking lazy all the writing is. Frances McDormand plays a woman haunted by the rape and murder of her late daughter, a woman who hounds the local cops with THREE BILLBOARDS in order to make things right, in order to get justice.

Here is some great writing in this movie. # 1: the sheriff, who she bothers about his incompetence, isn't all bad, is actually a good guy, because -- cough, cough -- he has cancer, and this illness means he is a human whose human feelings should be taken into consideration.

# 2: Frances McDormand's character carries extra pain about her daughter's unsolved murder because she literally said "I hope you get raped and murdered" out the door to her daughter, who was then raped and murdered.

# 3: The end of the movie comes about, partially, because a female character portrayed as an idiot says begets and everyone freaks out about it (comically, I guess?).

# 4: Thank the good lord I live in a city and the shallow who's on first routine that featured the n-word being parried, back and forth, in a "joking" fashion regarding police brutality did not garner any laughs. (Other reviews have noted laughs during that scene, UGH.) But it was just gross. The film is exceedingly lazy about race & police and comes at it "cleverly" - which means that the two black characters in it end up as a couple, the inept police chief is replaced by a moral authority black cop, and (semi realistically, I guess), white people talk about other people's identities and what makes them different and joke about it, casually, without acknowledging other people's humanity. It just ends up being all over the place.

What gets me is I feel, truly, that Martin McDonagh and Phoebe Waller-Bridges have never known true pain, the death of a loved one, the way that things can get empty and moody and strange and vivid in the wake of such loss. That kind of loss -- according to their writing -- is just a feint and a part of a plot. And that basic disregard for grief and human life makes the zing and the voice of their writing cheap tricks in service to plot, which does everything a disservice.

Maybe someday they'll be good writers and not just party-trick charlatans.
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