Theater and Film Reviews: Martin McDonagh and Dark Humor

Hangmen

Written by Martin McDonagh

Directed by Matthew Dunster

Starring Mark Addy and Johnny Flynn

Atlantic Theater Company, Manhattan

February 28, 2018

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh

Starring Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson

Funny Games

Starring Anthony Jeselnik

Count Basie Theater, Red Bank NJ

February 22, 2018

Irish writer/director Martin McDonagh (b. 1970) is in the news for his Oscar-winner Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, but has been writing plays for 21 years. This week I had a chance to see this movie and his 2015 play Hangmen, sampling his dark humor. His earlier plays were set in Ireland and England, but he has recently taken on settings in the American South (as in the movie) and the rural American West (A Behanding in Spokane, 2010), nearly always involving sardonic wit in the face of crimes or death. I am a fan of his twisted crime caper film In Bruges (2008) set incongruously in the renaissance wonder of that Belgian city. His plots are dense with dwarfs, drunks, simpletons, and middle-class protagonists with thwarted ambitions or failed projects. This makes him a good match for the Western nations’ current interest in the issues of the “working class” and how their frustrations turn into populist politics. Yet his films are not overtly political, and he rarely projects sympathy for his characters.

In both Hangmen and Three Billboards McDonagh exhibits a keen eye for local accents and color (in rural northern England and rural Missouri, respectively). All the characters seem genuine, and there is close attention to regional accents, making parts of Hangmen difficult to follow word-for-word. The plots of both are designed to metaphorically comment on an important larger issue. In the two-hour Hangmen, set mostly in a pub, Harry (an outstandingly blustery and smoldering Mark Addy, left below), an aging pub-owner and intermittent hangman at the local prison, faces the consequences of the 1965 British abolition of capital punishment on his income and worldview. His frustrations eventually boil over into mob violence against a London “outsider” Mooney (a comic and dark Johnny Flynn) who threatens the local town status quo, quite possibly with criminal intent. 

We see local pub denizens blindly following the violent pack, regardless of their education, intelligence, or supposed ethics. Violent acts are depicted and described alongside humorous quips. The play builds nicely to a brutal climax, but leaves moral issues unresolved. There is a similarly ambiguous moral ending to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and the movie also portrays lots of local characters of varied intelligence (most notably a tragic and dim policemen played wonderfully by Sam Rockwell, deserving winner of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), all set in a declining town where economic frustration is clear. Again, there is a flawed protagonist Mildred (a wonderful, nuanced Frances McDormond, winner of the Oscar for Best Actress) who erects three billboards protesting the unsolved death of her daughter, insulting the chief of police and antagonizing the conservative local community. 

The resultant violence feels like that of Hangmen, and also perhaps echoes the Ferguson Missouri violence of 2014, but not from a racial angle. Writer/director McDonagh never lets Mildred become a conventional wronged-mother stereotype; he fills her with outbursts, character flaws, and edginess that prevent our ever fully sympathizing with her tragedy and motivations. Similar to Mooney in Hangmen we understand her frustrations while never really pulling for her. McDonagh has a real talent for creating convincingly ambiguous characters that surprise us with both unexpected strengths and flaws, as most real people do. He also has a keen eye for how conservatism in rural communities can both unify and polarize, and how smallminded pettiness and jealousy can drive behavior. Mooney in Hangmen obsesses over his perceived status as the county’s second-best hangman, and rages against #1 as a way to vent his frustrations (ergo the title Hangmen). This aligns with one current theory about how white middle class workers without any real privation could feel so slighted—we do not always resent our absolute status, but our status relative to others—immigrants, blacks, Londoners, etc. The writer therefore has well-tuned antennae on the current mood. However, as an outsider to the USA, he treads very lightly on the racism of Ebbing in Three Billboards, and the movie largely veers away from this theme except for the transiently disruptive arrival of a new black police chief; this subplot feels a bit artificial, as if the director felt obliged to address race somehow without really doing so.

My only objection to McDonagh’s humor is its palpable sense of objectification. Too often we laugh at his characters from a perch above them, making them into biologic specimens for observation and analysis. This tension between laughing at and with is ages old in comedy. I was reminded of it in seeing talented comedian Anthony Jeselnik’s darkly funny set in New Jersey (coming to your area this year). 

Jeselnik, on the face of it, is an anti-PC comic mocking everyone without limits, similar to South Park (who somehow gets a PC pass because it is animation). His hour set ended with a 10-minute multi-joke saga about his accompanying his female friend to her abortion, and pulls no punches. Stumped in the waiting room, he is told that flowers are the worst possible gift for a woman after an abortion. After all, they require maintenance, care, feeding, none of which is what she would want to do. He disagrees! The worst gift would be----pause------pause------- a take-out container. The thing is, most of Jeselnik’s jokes are about himself and his own sociopathy, and his self-mockery prevents his set from degenerating into Don Rickles-style mockery of others. Even more, he sets up his jokes so that we create our own vision of the scene, derived from our movie or TV experience, then promptly shatters it with his resolution. For example, in a set on mental illness, he says that narcolepsy is perhaps the strangest and most disturbing of the disorders. “One minute I am with my friend John having coffee, talking normally, then….Pause…..Pause….Pause…the next minute I am having sex”.  All of this oddly sets up an empathetic overtone to the dark carnage. This is missing from McDonagh’s works. I never got the sense that he admires any of his characters, or perhaps anyone. I have seen reviews superficially praising Three Billboards for dealing with the “real” issues of rural America, but I think McDonagh mostly takes a very dismissive point of view towards the rural middle class. The movie is filled with mocking visuals of Don Cuervo drunk out of plastic bag containers, tacky bobble-head dolls, men wearing too much hair dye, and dim 19 year-old trophy-girlfriends. It is perhaps significant that dwarfs appear in two of his works—the human zoo. It is true that this type of local exotica is often the currency of black comedy, as in Frances McDormond’s other Oscar vehicle Fargo (1996).  However, that movie maintained a warmth despite its depravity, not seen in Three Billboards. While McDonagh’s keen eye for visual and verbal absurdity enlivens his works, he never really lets us see a human side that we can engage with. I think that some of this is needed in even the darkest of humor, if for no other reason than to make our emotions sway back and forth, rather than staying in the perspective of the zoo attendee.