It's difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about Martin McDonaugh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Like his 2008 film In Bruges, it's a mix of intense drama and pitch-black comedy sprinkled with a light dusting of absurdity. The concoction, not unlike when I first had a salted caramel flavored beer, is both strange and addictive: I'm not sure what I feel about this, but I....I kinda like it!
Three Billboards is the story of a mother's grief. Frances McDormand, who is excellent in every movie she's been in, including this one, plays Mildred Hayes, a middle-aged woman whose daughter was raped, killed, and burned into unrecognizable ash just outside the town limits of Ebbing. After 7 months, it seems like the local police force is too busy sitting on their thumbs to make any arrests. So Mildred rents out three dilapidated billboards along the road where her daughter was murdered to send a message to the police and specifically the chief. The messages read:
RAPED WHILE DYING
AND STILL NO ARRESTS?
HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?
(To give you a sense of the kind of humor this movie trades in, when Mildred and her 17 year old son, Robbie [played by the wonderful Lucas Hedges], drive down this road, Robbie remarks "Oh, great, the 'Raped while dying' route")
Willoughby treats Mildred with respect compared to other members of the community, including her ex-husband Charlie (played--you guessed it--wonderfully by John Hawkes) and the hotheaded, slow-witted police officer Dixon, played MORE THAN WONDERFULLY by Sam Rockwell in one of the best performances of his career--which has been filled with amazing performances.
Officer Dixon is probably the most complicated character in the film. He's angry and abusive, but he longs for approval. He's the epitome of a blatantly racist small-town cop. He's everything wrong with police today distilled into one character: not that smart, thinks he's all that, lazy as hell--except when beating the shit out of innocent people. He's irredeemable. Or so you think....Three Billboards is full of surprises, both good and bad.
I won't get into the details of the plot since that would spoil the movie, but I'll distill my overall impressions into a couple sentences and you can decide if this is a movie you want to see:
1) As I said, the acting in Three Billboards is, to a performance, excellent, A+, perfecto. You will not be disappointed by a single performance in this film. Somehow, McDonagh gathered Hollywood's best and brightest and wrung out every drop of acting they had to give.
2) If you like movies where justice is served and peace and order restored in a way we rarely see in real life, then this is not the movie for you. The plot arc is really more of a rollercoaster and there's no neat little bow tying things up and the end.
3) There is, however, redemption. Three Billboards might be the most "Christian" movie that's not explicitly about religion I've seen this year. In particular, the character arcs that Mildred and Dixon travel throughout the film are like something out of the Bible (or a Greek tragedy, as my mother, who saw the movie with me, said). Three Billboards is about a lot of things, but it's surprisingly not about justice. It's about something deeper than justice--it's about forgiveness, redemption, hope, and love. And if all that sounds cheesy, I can assure you that the path this film takes towards these fuzzy feelings is the opposite of cheesy. It's goddamn brutal. It's a trial by fire, literally. To steal the title of a Rebecca Solnit book, it's about "Hope in the dark".
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will enrage you. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. You might hate it or you might love it. But I can promise you one thing: It won't bore you.
Grade: A-
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