Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017): Written and
directed by Martin McDonagh. Starring: Francis McDormand, Woody
Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage, Lucas Hedges, and, of course,
Željko
Ivanek. Running Time: 115
minutes.
Rating:
3/4
**this
review contains assorted spoilers for In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and Three
Billboards**
Every
year there seems to be at least one solidly good, if flawed, movie that ends up
getting hyped just a bit too much come awards season, prompting a backlash from
those insisting that the film isn’t that good, or is actually terrible, and
then a backlash to the backlash, and on and on.
Meanwhile, the heated arguments move so far beyond the starting point that
the film itself ends up completely forgotten and left in the dust. Some of these films do deserve such treatment
(looking at you, Crash), but many do
not, and much to my disappointment, this year the anvil has fallen on one of my
all-time favorite writers.
Martin
McDonagh is an Irish playwright who, after solidly establishing himself as one
of the most celebrated playwrights in Irish history, began making forays into
films with his 2004 live-action short Six
Shooter, which eventually won an Oscar, and followed up with his first
feature-length films, In Bruges
(2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012). After a long hiatus to work on his
latest play, he returned this year with Three
Billboards, and for the first time has seen a movie of his become a serious
awards darling, winning big at the Golden Globes and entering the Oscars a
heavy favorite in many of the major categories.
This despite the fact that it is not one of his better films. Like with Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese
before him, I’m happy to see him get accolades, but can’t help wishing it were
for one of his earlier, better works.
Three Billboards tackles a lot- a LOT-
of subject matters, but first and foremost it’s the story of Mildred (Francis
McDormand), a middle-aged, divorced mother growing increasingly bitter and
angry at the inability of the local police force to make any progress in
solving the rape-and-murder case of her daughter. Determined to push Chief Willoughby (Woody
Harrelson) any way she can, she rents out three abandoned billboards on the
road near her house, posting a series of messages on them deliberately meant to
provoke as strong a reaction as possible from both the police force and the
town as a whole.
This
provokes a whole series of events, many darkly comic, many just sad, involving
a nerdy ad manager, a trigger-happy cop played by Sam Rockwell, a cancer
subplot, arson, domestic violence, and more.
The movie is very well-shot and superbly well-acted (Lucas Hedges,
playing Mildred’s son, has not been getting enough praise for his small but
crucial role), but the story and many of the intended characters arcs
ultimately fail to connect in all the ways they’re clearly supposed to. McDonagh’s best movie remains In Bruges, where both the characters and
the world they occupy are so perfectly fitted to one another that, at the end
of it, you realize the story could not possibly have played out any other
way. His most transcendent work remains
his 2003 play The Pillowman, where
the characters and world are just vague enough that it could be set anytime and
anywhere. Three Billboards falls well short of both heights, and a clear part
of this lies with how its narrative develops.
Specifically, with how unbelievably circular much of the plot ends up
being.
See,
usually the realm of the stage is that of the circular plot, where characters
and props and story points all come around by the end to connect to each other. Each characters will eventually be (or always
were) bound to the others in highly coincidental ways. While regularly excused in theater, this
conceit is usually disdained (or at least hidden as well as possible) in movies
due to its clear artifice, but with In
Bruges, McDonagh made one of the rare great films where this circularity is
stunningly effective. This is mostly
thanks to how well the film’s setting evokes a fairytale atmosphere in both a
dreamlike and nightmarish sense. Three Billboards utilizes this same
approach- most obviously in cases like the choice of a hospital bed, the
identity of an arsonist, even a tease about who the rapist might be- but to
noticeably less effect. Here again, I
can’t help but feel the setting is the cause of this. Bruges feels like exactly the sort of place
where the streets fill up with fog every night, and where you’d never feel
surprised to meet the same cast of characters on every street corner, where life,
hate, and love repeat themselves endlessly.
In the flatlands and open spaces of a Midwestern American town, less
so.
This
could maybe have worked better had the movie carried more similarities in tone
and mood to McDonagh’s other major film, Seven
Psychopaths. While that film is also
filled with one remarkable coincidence after another, it’s a movie more focused
on deconstructing itself than telling a story, so worrying about problems or
inconsistencies of plot or characters is just about pointless. Three
Billboards, by contrast, is clearly striving to tell a good, straight story
about interesting characters, and has to be judged on those merits.
Narrative
issues aside, let’s dive into where the real heated stuff about the film
lies. Like purveyors of Fox News, we all
know what we’re really here for; the hot, spicy racism. There are two main thrusts of criticism of
the film that have taken shape; that it unsuccessfully (and say callously) tries
to be a movie “about” racism and police brutality, and that it’s a movie that
redeems (or excuses, or “explains”) the racism of its most hateful and bigoted
character, Sam Rockwell’s Officer Dixon.
The
fact that the movie does clearly try to at least include racism and police
brutality as major themes is its biggest weakness. We are given a sense that the town is a
racially-mixed place with a very Ferguson-like history of animosity between the
police and the town’s minority communities.
Yet we only really have three characters of color in the whole film, two
of whom are there solely to appear on-screen, comment on the police, and then
in one case literally be “disappeared” for most of the rest of the film. The third character, a black police officer
appearing late in the game to assist in Mildred’s case, might have been
intended as a balance to this, and to give the police some shading as well, but
here too he isn’t around nearly enough to make a big enough impact. This isn’t to say that McDonagh can’t or
shouldn’t tackle racism, but as a particularly memorable scene from In Bruges shows, he’s much better
at approaching it as a white man poking fun at other white men for the
absurdity of their bigotry. His efforts
here to use black characters solely for this purpose feels off, even within the
context of the film, and I understand why this was a key breaking point for
many viewers.
The
question of whether or not Officer Dixon is “redeemed” by the end of the film
is a bit trickier. Over the course of
his career, McDonagh has created some of the most hateful, pessimistic,
cynical, violent, and cruel characters imaginable, with many of his stories
centering around how the particular cruelty of various characters lead to
endless cycles of violence, injury, and recrimination. Very few of his works end with anything
approaching redemption or salvation, but his best works do at least allow
moments of genuine love and/or tenderness to shine through the darkness. Here again, In Bruges and The Pillowman
stand out especially well, another reason why they’re his best works. Three
Billboards clearly wants to have moments like this- there are a lot of
scenes that try to let the characters’ inner softness or goodness peak out- but
their effectiveness is much more mixed.
In
regards to Officer Dixon, then, can we say his character is redeemed by the
end? I would argue he isn’t. McDonagh himself is on the record saying he
doesn’t see Dixon as redeemed, nor did he try to write that in as part of the
script. There is, of course, the
infamous “letter scene” where a letter from Chief Willoughby insists that Dixon
is only as hateful as he is because he’s “had a hard life” and he’s really “a
good person, deep down.” This moment is
one of the film’s bigger clunkers, for a number of reasons, but even here I don’t
think this was intended as a sort of absolution for Dixon- it could simply be a
very dark joke meant to show that Willoughby was wrong, dead wrong, about Dixon
the whole time, and every minute he spent defending him was wasted breath. It wouldn’t be the first time McDonagh
designed a character’s death to be a horribly misguided attempt to save people
beyond saving. That the scene could
be misinterpreted as a saving grace moment for the character lies, then, less
with the explicit intention and more in a failure of execution.
One
of the more interesting interpretations I’ve read about the film is that, in
fact, no one is saved, and both the main characters are irredeemably twisted by
the end. The movie ends with Dixon and
Mildred in a car, contemplating murdering a man unconnected to the crime at
hand, and unsure of whether or not they will actually go through with it. This I find to be a rather fitting way to
end, because, for all the justification behind Mildred’s anger, it’s hard to
escape feeling that she’s let it twist itself into something far darker. She has suffered, yes, but can that excuse
the suffering she metes out to others, sometimes at random? Her daughter is gone, but her son is still
there. He pleads with her time and again
to change her behavior, trying to make her see the ways her mini-war on Chief
Willoughby is making his life harder, but not once do we see her pause to
consider this. Maybe she and Dixon have
both fallen beyond saving, and those who think otherwise are just fooling
themselves.
Perhaps,
in the end, the movie just handicaps itself by biting off too much in trying to
handle racism and police brutality on top of its central story. If it were more tightly focused on a single
woman’s search for justice and anger over the inefficiencies of the justice
system, we likely would have had a much stronger film that would never have
prompted such controversy to begin with.
Violent crime against women going aggravatingly unpunished is very much
a real issue that movies can and should tackle.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of artists and filmmakers more
than able to tackle both that and other issues like racism within the same film-
there most certainly are- but McDonagh isn’t one of them, at least not
yet.
Three Billboards is a good movie, solid
in a lot of ways, but too uneven to count as a great film. And while I have been an avid fan of McDonagh’s
for a long time and would love to see a film of his dominate the Oscars one
day, this isn’t the film that should.
-Noah Franc
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