Gerwig feared for film’s reception
Greta Gerwig expressed fear that her semi-autobiographical movie Lady Bird would be a disappointment to the audience as it was revealed as the surprise film at the BFI London Film Festival.
Lady Bird, an Oscar-tipped coming-of-age drama, is the Frances Ha star’s direc- torial debut. It was revealed as the surprise film on the penultimate night of the festival.
As the end credits rolled, Tricia Tuttle, deputy head of festivals for the British Film Institute, welcomed Gerwig and lead actress Saoirse Ronan to the stage.
Tuttle revealed that Gerwig had been worried about the reception Lady Bird would get as the surprise film, saying: “Before we came on, Greta said, ‘Are they going to be really disappointed it’s not Thor?’”
Drawing to a close last night with the British premiere of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (JJJJJ) this year’s BFI London Film Festival certainly went out with a bang. In Bruges director Martin Mcdonagh’s latest gives Frances Mcdormand the sort of explosive showcase that gets Oscar-speculators drooling by casting her as a steely mother who uses the titular billboards to call out the failings of local police chief (Woody Harrelson) for failing to arrest anyone over the brutal murder of her teenage daughter seven months earlier. The mordant black comedy that follows is audacious in ways both hilarious and moving as Mcdormand’s Mildred strides through town like Marge Gunderson crossed with Mad Max, her increasing propensity for frontier justice coming to the fore as she’s set on a collision course with Sam Rockwell, brilliantly cast against type as Harrelson’s hate-filled, Iq-challenged police deputy.
Mcdormand’s wasn’t the only great female performance over the festival’s final weekend. Greta Gerwig turned up with star Saoirse Ronan to present her directorial debut, Lady Bird (JJJJ) in the festival’s surprise film slot. Confessing in that she’d been nervous that the 1,600-strong audience would be disappointed not to be seeing the new Thor movie, she needn’t have worried: her coming-of-age comedy went down a storm. Ronan is par- ticularly good as the eponymous self-named 17-year-old – and the film is full of funny and perceptive observations, with Laurie Metcalf wonderful as Lady Bird’s harassed but attentive mother.
Next to films like this, Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying (JJ) was an unexpected slog. A road movie about a trio of ageing Vietnam War veterans (Steve Carell, Lawrence Fishburn and Bryan Cranston) who reunite to help Carell’s character, Doc, transport the body of his killed-in-combat son home for burial, it’s very conventional by Linklater’s standards, a sort of grumpy-oldmen buddy comedy in which Cranston doesn’t so much chew the scenery as treat it like a starving man at an allyou-can-eat buffet. Expect it to debut on Amazon’s streaming platform.
Not that there’s any shame in that. Premium TV is where the talent is going. Proving that point at the festival was the LFF Connects: David Fincher (JJJJJ) event, a live Q&A with the hilariously sardonic director of Fight Club in which he talked about his move into TV, particularly his latest Netflix venture, the Zodiac-esque Mindhunter. Though Fincher talked entertainingly about his career highlights, he was fascinating on the future of TV, his optimism fuelled by the “very large talent pool of people who don’t feel there’s much sustenance for them working for Marvel.”
Still, when you see amazing films, there’s nothing better and that was certainly the case with Lynne Ramsay’s Your Were Never Really Here (JJJJJ). Reconfirming the Glaswegian director as one of the best filmmakers in the world, this hitman thriller plays like an abstract riff on Taxi Driver, with a bear-like Joaquin Phoenix on tremendous form as a Ptsd-afflicted veteran hired to retrieve a politician’s kidnapped daughter. Subverting every genre cliché, it was the best film of a very strong festival.