Ask Mick LaSalle:
‘Three Billboards’ was indulgent and unlikable?
Dear Mick: I see “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” as indulgent, with characters that are unlikable and over-the-top scenes that aren’t funny. Doesn’t art have to risk more sentiment and a less ambiguous ending to make its point, or would that be too trite?
Andy Crockett, Alameda Dear Andy: It’s not trite to ask, but I’d say the answer is no. Art doesn’t have to risk sentiment or not risk sentiment. Art pretty much creates its own rules and persuades or doesn’t. However, you’re right — ambiguity is not good. But that ending is not ambiguous. If we think about the movie and the characters, we know what’s going to happen when they get to where they’re going. The ending is subtle, but clear. Dear Mick LaSalle: How much credit should a director get when an actor in his or her movie gets nominated for or wins an award for best acting? The four actors who won this year were in movies where none of the directors got nominated for best directing.
Paul Sheinfeld, Novato Dear Paul Sheinfeld: The actor is always the person who deserves the credit, but directors can be essential, sometimes determinant. It depends on the actor, and it depends on the director. Some directors really work with the actors, and others less so, and still others seem to exert influence without saying much. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi told me that Claude Chabrol never said much but communicated powerfully just by sitting there.
When you watch an Ingmar Bergman movie, you have to credit Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson for their astounding, jaw-dropping, eternal performances. But you can’t help but notice that they were never better than when they worked with Bergman. Robert De Niro is great, but a lot greater when he is in Martin Scorsese’s films. Christoph Waltz is a remarkable actor and always grabs the audience’s attention, but when he works with Quentin Tarantino, we enter the land of magic. Any performance is the actor’s achievement, but some directors are better than others at creating an environment in which brilliance is possible. Dear Mick: While watching this year’s Oscar ceremony, I got to thinking about the ceremonies of the past, those hosted by Johnny Carson, David Niven, Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, to mention a few. The earlier broadcasts had one element that seemed to be missing in Sunday’s ceremony — dignity. Whatever happened to dignity? I wonder if you agree.
Walter Jaffee, Crockett Dear Walter: Maybe a little. But with a lot of these hosts, the memory is better than the reality. Bob Hope’s Oscar monologues, which I thought were funny when I was 10, are thuddingly unfunny revisited on YouTube. Niven really wasn’t a host, but part of an experiment in multiple hosts, and that was on only one occasion. There’s very little YouTube on Sinatra’s one hosting gig in 1963, but there’s a lot on Johnny Carson, and he was the best, in my opinion. He had a sense of dignity and occasion about him, but he was also funny. Dignity can be overrated. It can be a fallback for phonies.
But it’s far from entirely useless. The British have always done dignity well. Americans generally don’t, and it’s part of our national character to respond to people who can undercut and puncture decorum, whether we’re talking about Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln or John Kennedy making wisecracks at a news conference or Ronald Reagan saying “There you go again” to a sitting president. But all these little infractions against dignity only work if there is some monolith of dignity to play off of, some understood standard of behavior being nudged and stretched, but not destroyed. Right now, we’re living in a fairly undignified era. I don’t miss dignity at the Academy Awards, because I don’t associate the movie business with dignity, even if they were better at faking it 30 years ago. But I do miss dignity in other areas of American life, because, unlike in Hollywood, in some places it used to be real.