“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “Jigsaw” Are the Same Movie
It turns out that, except for a few remote-controlled torture devices rebuilt from a Rube Goldberg funhouse, “Jigsaw”—the eighth installment in the “Saw” franchise, which is in theatres now and bears a Rotten Tomatoes rating of thirty-two per cent—is basically the same film as “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the widely touted Oscar candidate that, with a rating of ninety-six per cent, opens this Friday. Both films are rooted in a fanatical quest for justice born not of an abstract devotion to principle but of a personal agony that sparks anger and cruelty and leads to gore and mayhem.
In “Jigsaw,” the recurring antihero, John Kramer (Tobin Bell), who was killed off long ago, turns out not to be dead; he’s back, tormenting people whom he somehow knows to be responsible for unpunished misdeeds (ranging from actual crimes to moral transgressions). His mode of punishment is a series of macabre games, inaugurated with a one-word command: “Confess!” (John, a cancer survivor, went through agonies of his own when a technician mislabelled his X-ray; that technician is one of his subjects.) The film is directed by the Spierig brothers, Michael and Peter, whose 2014 time-travel thriller, “Predestination,” is one of the most inventive recent science-fiction films. “Jigsaw” begins with a seemingly routine chase of a suspect by uniformed officers. The chase soon turns eerie, when the cornered man turns out to be armed with a remote-controlled device that he threatens to trigger; Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie), a plainclothes detective on the scene, recognizes the terror that the officers risk unleashing unwittingly, but he himself has a background of official misconduct and extrajudicial violence, and may be in on the conspiracy.
“Three Billboards,” too, centers on a local police department’s internal affairs. Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a middle-aged woman whose teen-age daughter was raped and killed seven months earlier. The assailant hasn’t been found, and Mildred—who lives in a house on the edge of a small town, in clear sight of the three long-abandoned roadside billboards of the title—suddenly gets the idea to jump-start the investigation by renting those billboards and posting on them three phrases: “Raped while dying”; “And still no arrests?”; “How come, Chief Willoughby?” Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) is a beloved figure in the town of Ebbing, but one of the handful of folksy and bumbling officers (all of whom are white) under Willoughby’s command, Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), is a brazen racist who is known to have tortured a black suspect but has never faced punishment for it. When the billboards—which Mildred rents from the local advertising salesman, Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones)—go up, they enrage the town’s residents, who, despite their sympathy for Mildred, resent the insult to their police chief. In a melodramatic touch that, like all such twists, rises or sinks on the substance with which it’s infused (in this case: scant), Willoughby is dying of pancreatic cancer. His illness is an open secret, which enrages the townsfolk and the officers all the more against Mildred, and renders her, and anyone associated with her, the target of vigilante action, whether at the hands of Dixon or of others.
Both movies feature a straitlaced but street-smart police official played by a black actor (in “Three Billboards,” the role is played by Clarke Peters, whose performance in Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer,” from 2012, is among the most memorable of recent years; in “Jigsaw,” the character is played by Clé Bennett), and both movies involve suspicions cast upon other officials. (“Jigsaw” features a pair of medical examiners, one an Army veteran, played by Matt Passmore, and the other a colleague with unusual hobbies, played by Hannah Emily Anderson, in a memorably chilly turn.) And, above all, both films feature some horrific violence and bodily wreckage that turn even seemingly random events into a sort of expiation in blood, invested with a high moral purpose. In “Jigsaw,” this comes off as comically absurd; in “Three Billboards,” it is played with a righteous earnestness.
If it weren’t for the extended scenes of mechanized and remote-controlled torture being inflicted on the ordinary miscreants of “Jigsaw”—if those scenes took place offscreen and “Jigsaw” were centered on a search by a bunch of officers—the two movies would be conspicuously similar. In “Three Billboards,” Mildred’s quest for justice veers quickly toward a desire for revenge; her anger at fate leads her to a general and universal anger that fixates on Willoughby as the agent of a fierce justice. Mildred renders herself an outcast, and drags others into the vortex of her rage, by taking justice personally, by distrusting in process, and, above all, by denying chance and coincidence—by looking at social processes as mechanistically, as deterministically, and as strictly causally as the game-loving criminal mastermind of “Jigsaw” does, and trying to exert control.
“Three Billboards” is a game, too—a cinematic game in which the writer and director, Martin McDonagh, feigns empathy with a magician’s sleight of hand. His characters’ ordeals, demands, sacrifices, and redemptions fit together like, well, a jigsaw puzzle, and he retrofits their traits and experiences to fit. In “Three Billboards,” I have the sense that, despite the fulsome emotional displays, McDonagh is far more interested in his narrative contraptions and contrivances than in his characters, who exist solely to play their part in the plot. His characters are robotic silhouettes spouting gaudily profane wisdom that is dispensed two hundred and eighty characters at a time; his excellent actors have to sweat every line, weigh every gesture, and pose every gaze, pouring every ounce of their skill into humanizing the flimsy simulacra that are written for them. (McDormand’s controlled fury, more than any other factor, keeps the film unified and dramatically engaging even when little else does.) McDonagh also scatters progressive political crumbs throughout the film, and his obscene trivialization of their substance is displayed in the cavalier casualness with which a black woman’s arrest and imprisonment on trumped-up charges drops in as a plot point and out with a smile.
As for violence and gore, McDonagh seems more turned on by it than the Spierigs are. Though I’m squeamish, I found the scenes of grotesquely and meticulously imagined torture in “Jigsaw” to reflect a degree of restraint, bordering on aversion—which suggests that the filmmakers’ actual interests lie elsewhere. McDonagh’s theme of expiation by violence plays a repellent double game; even as his plot pivots on the acknowledgment of misdirected anger and the emotional effort to overcome it, the movie reflects an almost erotically tantalizing excitement at the prospect of showing the gory impact of that warped rage. McDonagh seems excited by it, and he displays it with a blend of suspense-building anticipation and blatant enthusiasm that reflects his own arousal and is meant to arouse viewers as well.
Both “Jigsaw” and “Three Billboards” depict quests for justice veering toward injustice, present obsession veering toward madness, show frustration with process veering toward monstrosity, show abuse of police power as a primal evil that sickens the system and the people who depend on it. “Three Billboards” is naturalistic, detailed, and earnest; “Jigsaw” is cartoonish, sketchy, and absurd. Yet “Jigsaw” is made with a high degree of directorial self-consciousness, which anchors the action and conditions the tone on its own thematic grid. “Three Billboards” sinks with vain and self-important moral bombast into dramatic titillation. “Jigsaw” is positioned as an exploitative piece of torture porn; “Three Billboards” is positioned as a work of mature humanism, but it’s the sleazier film.
