Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri might stand as a good metaphor for our times, from some points of view. Although the movie itself is far from perfect. Characters are long on rage and short on reflection. Vindictiveness flowers and it’s a brutal movie. It’s at times awkward, even misshapen, and while those things can work in the movie’s favor, it’s also hard to believe that the lurching missteps are deliberate. Three Billboards may be accidently an interesting picture.
The grief and rage of Mildred (Frances McDormand) dominate the screen. Her eyes flash and dart, cast scorn on people she considers enemies -- just about everyone in the film -- and in rare moments you can see that Mildred’s fierce looks reflect the unrelenting pain she feels since her daughter was raped and murdered less than a year ago. No one has yet been charged with the crime.
Mildred’s defining act is to rent three billboards to try to shame the local sheriff (Woody Harrelson) for what she sees as his inaction. Even though the billboards sit near Mildred’s house on a two-lane country road few people travel, the town is upset. For Mildred, though, that’s just the start and she manages to inflict a lot more pain than the three signs.
Director Martin McDonagh, who's best known for In Bruges, hasn't lost his flair for brutality. Violence comes fast and hard. You don't often see it coming, and it can be random.
McDonagh draws a town wracked by ignorance, anger and resentment. Just about everybody hates everybody else. Revenge over imagined attacks seems to govern this place, surrounded by placid green, forested, rolling hills, and virtually no one cares to find out truth. They're ready to kill even when they know that their target may not be guilty. Characters revel in their own stupidity and love of getting even. An early clue comes when a young man sits at his desk in the billboard rental office reading Flannery O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one of the most contemptuous pictures of humankind ever written.
But the simple demonstrations of rage don’t take the movie far enough. It’s got plenty of shock value, but after the shock comes unresolved and muddled emptiness. And that four-letter word I'm not allowed to say on the air which begins with F just spews out and doesn’t amass the power to hold the place of the actual dialogue the movie needs. Spike Lee, for instance, does it better in Do the Right Thing, so that that single word creates character and situation. Here it sounds like an affectation, as if British-born director McDonagh, who also wrote the film, doesn’t understand the language of his characters. Unrelenting verbal hostility loses its bite after a short while, and gets in the way. Neither the audience nor the characters get to see and hear below the noisy surface of the film. The characters utter a few good quips, but quips tend to dissipate or avoid the possible strength of talk. Three Billboards feels as if it's pandering to our worst instincts.
The film deserves credit for sheer nerve and for breaking all sorts of Hollywood rules, like killing off a major character halfway through the movie. That death doesn’t leave you wondering, though, like Janet Leigh’s untimely passing in Psycho. It leaves a void in the film, from which it never recovers.
Three Billboards feels like a first draft of a movie that’s not ready. You can’t avoid the sense that something is going on, but it’s not yet figured out. Maybe the sheer strength of Frances McDormand’s performance creates that sense. Her command of speech, posture and gesture make you feel like the sheriff, who doesn’t have the force of personality to stand up to her and must relent. McDormand just needs a stronger movie to contain her.
