Tuesday, January 23, 2018

BILLBOARDS

BILLBOARDS

          Another movie dealing with the American small town, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (one of the weirdest titles in years), explores an intense and ultimately complicated emotional climate that breeds a number of related stories, all growing out of a terrible crime committed before the action begins.  Like last year’s excellent Manchester by the Sea, the film offers no real answers, no real resolution to its problematic events and troubled people, but differs in at least suggesting some faint amelioration of its central character’s attitudes and their effect on others.  More sentimental and, not incidentally, more violent than Manchester, it examines some of the same situations as its predecessors—broken marriages, illness, alienation, and a terrible tragedy that propels the action and the emotion.
          Frances McDormand plays the central character, Mildred, who dominates the movie in every way, so much so that her feelings and behavior open up other plots involving other people in the town, all of them connected to her particular situation.  Understandably devastated by her daughter’s rape and murder seven months before, she simmers in a cauldron of guilt, grief, anger, and bitterness, which boils over into a series of increasingly drastic decisions.  She resurrects the decrepit billboards of the title, posting messages accusing the sheriff (Woody Harrelson) and his department of incompetence and malingering in the search for her daughter’s killer.  The billboards ignite controversy in Ebbings, in effect forcing people to choose sides—most of them against her—in her increasingly public crusade.
Mildred’s plight leads her to some occasionally comical moments, as when she serially kicks a trio of vandalizing high school students in the groin, or calls a reporter a bitch on live TV; she also delivers a devastating lecture to her parish priest when he attempts some sort of consoling visit.  Her frustration finally explodes into a drastic, dangerous attack on the local police station, which almost kills a deputy and in itself makes little sense, damaging the credibility of a work devoted to some vision of small town reality.  The movie also shows a shocking suicide and two savage beatings, perhaps the inevitable result of the anomalous emotionalism that leaches into the hard, tough surface of Mildred’s life and location—her condition affects everyone.
          Intentionally or not, Three Billboards also emphasizes the often melancholy truth that everybody has a sad history, a personal story, most of them disappointing narratives of failure, loss, and that epidemic American disease, loneliness.  One of the local deputies, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who brutalizes prisoners, lives in a crummy shack of a house with his drunken, dependent mother, and drinks himself sodden on duty; both his sadism and boozing result apparently from the emptiness of his life, his sense of his own inadequacy.  Mildred’s husband (John Hawkes) has left her for a nineteen-year-old, a separation that along with her behavior further alienates her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges, who played a similar role in Manchester By the Sea), a lost, unhappy teenager.
          Oddly, the moral center of Three Billboards shifts from Mildred’s anger and outrage to the plight of the sheriff, dying of cancer; he becomes something like the voice of kindness and sympathy in Ebbing, delivering compassionate advice to all the important people he deals with throughout the movie and even in a way providing a hint of hope for all of them.  His words may signify something like a blessing and even a promise of something better for this troubled community and its unhappy citizens, including the deputy and the grieving Mildred.  If Mildred’s tragedy disrupts the community, his words move toward some sense of restoration and possibly even hope.

          The performances, the setting, the action all meld together successfully, with barely a false note anywhere.  Predictably, Frances McDormand inhabits her character with precision, projecting the grief that turns into anger and violent action, and even managing to create humor in this angry, unforgiving woman, a tough performance in a mostly tough little film.