Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
We open to a haunting operatic track and the ghostly remains of three disused billboards, featuring the creepy head of a baby on one and a stripped and leaking landscape on another. Despite the obvious, exposition-y title, this is a film that goes far beyond what the trailers paint it as. The basic plot is that Mildred Hayes, single mother and gift-shop owner, starts a vendetta for justice when local authorities fail to catch her daughter’s murderer.
But the messages she pastes upon the billboards are merely a jumping-off point and have the incendiary effect of a lit cigarette in a gas leak. Everything in the town of Ebbing comes to the fore: its intolerance, its ignorance and its desire not to kick up the dust and stir the pot (to mix a few metaphors) and keep everything calm and cushy no matter what the cost. Through Ebbing’s fucked up tangle of a community, we garner snapshots of lives ruined, lives remade and lives bitterly confused and confusedly bitter. Amongst many things, it is a brilliant portrait of a broken America whose history of anger and violence runs as deep as its ability to deny culpability even when the past is staring it in the face with a loaded shotgun.
A live hand grenade of a film, Three Billboards is foul mouthed and vitriolic, and just so utterly “Hey fuckhead!” unapologetic that it will neither give you the story you want nor make for comfortable viewing, but is nevertheless, in its brazen and ballsy kind of way, incredibly refreshing.
King of gallows humour, writer and director Martin McDonagh is a forensic pathologist of comedy, extracting the teensiest ounce of mirth from the bleakest of situations. Fans of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths will find the same levels of disturbing humour and savage dialogue that they’ve come to expect from McDonagh, but whilst the movie contains his trademark excessive violence and barbed exchanges, his third feature film is an altogether different kettle of fish. This is, by far, the most powerful and utterly devastating film of his career, even if he sometimes throws his story so far into the absurd that his characters end up somewhat caricatures of themselves.
Three Billboards pairs the most brutal of violence with the tenderest of moments and never once allows you to cosy up in its storyline, instead choosing to give you severe emotional whiplash at every turn of its narrative maze. Tension mounts until it is almost unbearable, then dissipates with a beautifully executed one-liner. And, just as quickly, a hilarious exchange will become deadly. He will have you cringing until you laugh, laughing until you cry then crying until you cringe. Humans are fragile and unpredictable, the movie would have you believe, with nothing but a hair’s breadth separating the humanity from the inhumanity.
Sam Rockwell (Matchstick Men, Moon) very cleverly plays the very stupid character of Dixon and does the seemingly impossible: bringing charm and redemption to a depraved and twisted character. In her lead role, Frances McDormand (Fargo, Burn After Reading) is neither great nor incredible: she is her character. Her performance is so utterly breathtaking that there is no point distinguishing between actress and character, they are melded and mangled and utterly inseparable. Beneath it all, that are some chilling moments that riff off Spaghetti Westerns and the story acquires a whole new dimension when you think of Mildred as a modern vengeful gun-slinger.
Few films change you. This is one of the exceptions. It’s a film that doesn’t give a solitary shit who it offends, it doesn’t stamp the story with morality, nor pander to convention or tropes, but subverts Hollywood-saturated expectations of what a good story should do at every turn. This film is punk in spirit, not giving a flaming monkey fuck whether you like it or not, nor what star rating or what number you give it out of ten, so I won’t give it one. Enjoy.
