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.
