What kind of art do we need right now? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, the English and Irish playwright (The Pillowman) turned filmmaker. Whether or not McDonagh intended his film to be of this moment, Three Billboards arrives in a year when the prejudices of established power structures and the behavior of police and other civil institutions are at the forefront of cultural conversation in America. McDonagh addresses those subjects with the same bitten-off, hard-won humor and spurts of violence that will seem familiar to those who know his work. Three Billboards sees an America roiling with tension and bitterness over differences in race and class, and also makes room for characters facing more existential problems in their own lives. One such character is Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who when we meet her is a few months past the rape and murder of her daughter Angela. No arrests have been made, so one day Mildred - using money from the sale of her ex-husband's tractor - rents three billboards to post a message calling out Police Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for a lack of progress on the case. Willoughby is a beloved figure in Ebbing, and the billboards are perceived as an attack on the very goodness of the town itself. Mildred, who seems to have few interactions with people other than her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges), is dismissed as a woman driven mad by loss.
Three Billboards wants to be many things, but it isn't especially interested in being a mystery. Willoughby is sincere in his sympathy for Mildred and in his desire to solve the case, but all leads have run cold and there is no new evidence coming in. McDonagh is more interested in observing the town's underlying civic order and pointing out how close it is to slipping away. Willoughby can pacify Mildred - in the moment - while also controlling the racist deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell), but we find out in an early scene that the Chief has been diagnosed with cancer and that the prognosis isn't good. As Willoughby's energy fades the rest of Ebbing becomes more and more chaotic. All of this would be much more trenchant if McDonagh weren't enjoying himself so much. To answer the question I put at the beginning of this review, a kind of art that feels less necessary these days involves Europeans broadly characterizing American mores. McDonagh's natural theatricality makes Three Billboards feel like a broad swipe at American culture from someone who doesn't really want to get too close to it. McDonagh isn't interested in social realism, the Ebbing of this film never feels very much like a real place. Key locations like the police station and the office where Mildred rents the billboards from a nervous young man (Caleb Landry Jones) are across the street from each other, creating a convenient stage for two of the film's most violent scenes. Much attention is paid to shots of blood, such as in Mildred's altercation with a dentist and (in a moment that feels very false) Willoughby yanking out his Iv in the hospital. McDonagh lingers on a shot of Harrelson's blood on a hospital wall as if to say that we're all one bad doctor's visit away from the same fate.
Frances McDormand is as much of a spitfire as one might expect in Three Billboards, never compromising on Mildred's anger while also finding moments of dark humor. A flashback points out that Mildred maybe wasn't such a great parent, and McDormand plays Mildred's confrontations with her ex-husband (John Hawkes) with just the right level of resentment and fear. A less successful subplot involves Mildred crossing paths with a character played by Peter Dinklage, and McDonagh isn't shy about people using the word "midget". Neither McDormand nor Dinklage really look like they know what their scenes should be. The best casting decision McDonagh made though was Woody Harrelson as Chief Willoughby. Harrelson gets to play a wonderful warmth with his wife (Abbie Cornish) and children while projecting a kind of basic American competence on the job. (Abbie Cornish is actually a distraction as Willoughby's wife, she forgoes an American accent and I didn't believe Willoughby would have fallen for her.) But McDonagh wants to place heavy symbolic weight on what happens to Willoughby, and it's more than the film can bear. In its second half Three Billboards becomes more interested in Sam Rockwell's Officer Dixon, and McDonagh's broad take on the character as a blight on the American grain shifts the film into an almost operatic gear of social satire. Dixon is a showy role and Rockwell's performance matches the film tonally, but McDonagh is only nominally interested in the character's possible redemption. Willoughby has been reduced to a guiding spirit at this point, giving everyone instructions, and while he offers Dixon some hope the end of the film suggests that violence is Dixon's only way of really relating to others. The character's racism is situational - offhand references to torture and an insertion of the N-word - and the script doesn't take the time to show how Dixon's racial attitudes and relative power might do more insidious work upon the lives of Ebbing's residents of color. Of whom there appear to be about four. Martin McDonagh is more interested as a writer in the havoc people can wreak than in the way that individuals rub up against institutions, and it's that misplaced emphasis that reduces Three Billboards to well-acted curiosity.
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