John Hawkes – Memphis Flyer

For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a movie where everything clicks into place with utter perfection. Despite the incredible messiness of the story, situation, and characters’ lives, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is one of those films.

Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

It’s remarkable that a work of art that reaches this deeply into the soul of contemporary America would be written by an Irishman, but maybe it had to be. Maybe we’re too blinded by our own conflicts to see as clearly as Martin McDonagh, the playwright turned filmmaker most famous for the tricky crime comedy In Bruges. Three Billboards is steeped in bitter irony, but it is not by any stretch a comedy.

Come awards season, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about Francis McDormand’s performance as Mildred Hayes, the divorced, working class single mom in this rural outpost in the Ozarks. Mildred used to be a mother of two, but seven months ago her teenage daughter Angela was raped and murdered. Now she lives with her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges), stewing in guilt for her perceived failure to protect her child and simmering with rage at the police who still haven’t solved the horrific crime. Impulsively, she rents the titular advertising to send a public message to Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), hoping to embarrass him into action.

The easy thing to do for McDonagh would be to make Sheriff Wiloughby a moustache-twirling villain. But he’s not. Harrelson’s Willoughby may not be the most woke person in Missouri, but he is a hard working public servant who takes his oath of office seriously. He’s also working on a deadline, so to speak, having been diagnosed with cancer.

The same can’t be said for deputy Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), however. Dixon is a lazy, incompetent thug who was destined to be on one side of the carceral state or the other. His version of good police work is throwing the guy who owns the signs (Caleb Landry Jones) out of a second story window. McDonagh doesn’t let the characterization rest there, even though he could. Inside, Dixon is a weak, fearful person trapped in a toxic relationship with his alcoholic mother.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Nothing in Three Billboards is simple. As Mildred’s single minded quest for justice crosses the line into thirst for revenge, she starts to see herself in her abusive ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes). McDormand’s performance is one for the ages, a highlight of one of the most distinguished careers in American cinema. Her facial control is at once appropriately stoic for a country woman who has worked every day of her adult life and deeply expressive of inner pain. On the outside, she’s tough as nails and determined as the tides. On the inside, she is wracked with doubt and fear. McDormand hovers in this difficult space the entire movie, even when she’s going on a date with Peter Dinklage, who is having entirely too much fun with his moustache.

The complexity and depth of McDonagh’s script reminded me of the work of Dalton Trumbo, the legendary Spartacus and Roman Holiday screenwriter who was expert at balancing social commentary with real character and down to earth drama. In the theaters as well as in real life, 2017 has been a year of extremes, with the incredible high points like Get Out and Logan Lucky putting the failure of big budget studio tentpoles in stark relief. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri is a rare and thoughtful masterpiece for our troubled times.

After many years of little-noticed television guest appearances and one strong regular role on the HBO series Deadwood, John Hawkes emerged over the past decade as one of the movies’ most interesting and most durable supporting players. He grounded filmmaker Miranda July’s quirky Me and You and Everyone We Know. He deserved an Oscar for his tough, taciturn, but unexpectedly complicated Teardrop in the Ozarks indie Winter’s Bone. He made a seductive but soft-spoken cult leader in Martha Marcy May Marlene. Even in a smaller turn as a concerned janitor, Hawkes made for a heart-gripping source of audience identification amid the harried professionals and mussed-up movie stars of Contagion.

And so, with an Internet Movie Database filmography that’s 115 titles deep, it’s nice to see Hawkes finally get a hefty lead role in The Sessions.

Hawkes plays Mark O’Brien, a real-life poet and journalist who was the subject of the 1996 Oscar-winning documentary short Breathing Lessons and who died in 1999, at age 48. O’Brien wrote a newspaper article about his attempt to lose his virginity at age 38, and that article serves as both the foundation and on-screen catalyst for this film.

O’Brien, who was stricken with polio at age 6, is exceptionally strong of mind, soul, and character, but his body just doesn’t work. Mostly paralyzed, Mark lives his life in an iron lung and is only able — with aid of a respirator — to live outside of it for a few hours at a time. He’s dependent on a paid assistant to wash, clothe, and feed him, and his only real confidant seems to be a progressive parish priest, Father Brendan (a beatific William H. Macy), who gives him the go-ahead to fire his assistant.

A younger, prettier new assistant (Annika Marks) drives Mark “to ecstasies of despair,” and we learn that Mark’s mind isn’t quite the only part of his body that’s functional. Soon after, Mark is offered work on an article about sex and disability. “There was no escaping,” Hawkes says in voiceover. “A door had opened that I could not close.”

And so Mark, gripped with equal levels of excitement and fear, seeks out the assistance of a sex surrogate, Cheryl (Helen Hunt), who, through six sessions, will seek to take him on a journey from “body awareness exercises” to actual intercourse.

This is risky territory, in any number of ways, but The Sessions will surprise you. It’s tender but never soppy, and neither Hawkes nor Hunt (a comeback to his breakout) ever strives for an “Oscar moment.”

Hawkes plays O’Brien as a wry observer of his own fate. (“She held my penis. I haven’t even seen my penis in over 30 years,” Mark tells Father Brendan.) Hunt’s Cheryl is a committed professional who approaches her unusual work with a well-modulated mix of sensitivity and matter-of-factness. Both are helped by a script from writer/director Ben Lewin that avoids artificial big moments or speechifying. Like Hawkes, Lewin is having a breakout of sorts himself after a long, varied career (his last directing credit: a 2003 episode of the television series Touched By an Angel). He’s not much of a visual stylist, but The Sessions doesn’t need that.

In a film world where a bare female breast has more ratings ramifications than a murder, The Sessions exhibits a rare maturity about the physical and emotional realities of sex. There’s plenty of nudity, which is presented as entirely unremarkable. There’s not a whiff of exploitation here.

The yearning for love and connection — physical and emotional — is particularly complicated for Mark but is a universal concern, and it ripples through the other characters in his orbit: Cheryl lays down ground rules — “I have a private life, and I want you to know that. This therapy is about you.” — but her work with Mark affects her and complicates her homelife with loving husband Josh (an underused Adam Arkin). And the film is similarly generous and attuned to the emotional lives of other supporting characters.

The Sessions

Opening Friday, November 16th

Ridgeway Four