Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

I have noticed a long-held belief not at all limited to non-Americans that the best way to depict the US is through grotesque exaggeration of everything and adding a few bits of weirdness for us to shrug at and say “Random! But then that’s America for you!” Three Billboards is like that: stuffed with characters that exist through sheer accumulation of eccentric details. It veers across endless shifts in tone, not so much tragi-comedy as channel-surf: something guaranteed to earn the hushed respect of Hollywood screenwriters who go around muttering “tone” like an incantation and regard “playing with tone” as a level of art which Dostoyevsky could only yearn for. So we get just enough farce and stylised caricature to get us out of realism but then quick swerves into a portentous burlesque of serious drama to imply depth and weight. For a literary comparison, consider Martin Amis at his laziest. 

A plot summary shows the film is simultaneously simplistic and over-loaded. A constantly swearing, monotonously pissed-off middle-aged mother called Mildred (Frances McDormand), in a tiny town called Ebbing (“Fading” and “Dwindling” can probably be found crossed out in earlier drafts next to “something state-of-America-ish?”) decides to provoke the local police chief (Woody Harrelson) on his failure to catch her daughter’s killer with three billboards that publically lambast him for his lack of progress on the case, the flyover version of call-out tweets. The chief alas has terminal cancer and when Mildred is unmoved by this, her callousness enrages the deputy Dixon, a clueless hick thug (played for laughs by Sam Rockwell) who tries and fails either to end or avenge his beloved boss’ humiliation. The conflict draws in a gallery of satirical gargoyles, including her ex-husband and his cartoonishly child-like girlfriend, a dwarf who wants a date with Mildred, a malicious dentist, a sinister drifter, and whatever other melodramatic or comedic figure can be drafted in to drive up the overwrought effect, plus the occasional sop to pathos like her surviving son.

Martin McDonagh (who wrote and directed) keeps this one running on the bright energy of its individual components so that, scene by scene, line by line, our simmering impulse to walk out is deflected with a steady supply of grabby moments until in the end we're exasperated by its refusal to add up to more than all these bright components. In Three Billboards every scene has its sudden jolt or its big gag to justify itself; there’s a constant liveliness and knowingness and quotability and everything just continues until the running time is long enough and then we’re through. But well might we give up before then. None of it is as satisfyingly abrasive as Billy’s scenes in Seven Psychopaths, a movie-stealing performance from Sam Rockwell that totally over-shadows what he does with Dixon here.

Given the blithely warm reception he got for this, McDonagh now has every incentive to begin the gentle decline from “promising” to “once-promising” that lures directors whenever they learn the painful truth that critics and audiences can be mercilessly undemanding. This reception seems mainly to cluster around the caustic Mildred, who has attracted the kind of audience which responds gratefully to the promise that you can build your daily life around snappy snarky anger towards everyone who won’t fix the world the way you want it, and that in itself will make you a heroine. Mildred offers them a validation of their toxic Twitter accounts. 

Other fans seem drawn to the anti-idea that there’s nothing to say about America’s fractal complex of social conflicts except that shit happens. We’ve heard versions of this latter fatalism from the Coen brothers and it was popular when they did it too. The score for this was written by Carter Burwell who worked on a lot of the Coens’ films including Fargo with Frances McDormand. McDonagh clearly wants to pull the same trick as some of their better stuff, where we respond at two or three different levels at once, but you need a lot of groundwork before you can make that happen and this film just skips it all. The bits intended to feel hard or loaded with menace fall flat – the shifts from broad and jokey to sobering and back again can be heard to grind and clunk and McDonagh never seems sure if psychotic rapists and wife-beaters are the most controversial targets he wants to go after or not. Mildred’s pointless self-defeating firebomb attack on a police station with a random dwarf as alibi is the metaphor that sums up Three Billboards with a perfect description of itself. 

In Bruges was an origami of plotting and Seven Psychopaths was an ingenious auto-critique and neither of them presumed to make an important statement about life or the state of America.  After the playfulness of the debut and the follow-up, this one (where the writer-director steps up to make the important statement that he doesn’t quite know what to say) is the one that ends up with a hollow feel - life’s just slapstick chaos and the spirit of America can best be summed up by a thin jagged quirkiness. 

The only hope for the old McDonagh is the ending which, on the face of it, is a trite open non-ending with a corny last line - “I guess we’ll decide on the way.” He seems to just exploit the standard cues of an ending: a slowed down pace, an airy finality of mood, and a soft tinkly score in place of an actual conclusion. The surprise is that, in that final line, a genuine ambiguity appears. In the contrast between the decision the characters are likely to make without knowledge of a salient point and the one they might well make if they discover that point, and the distinct possibility that they might talk themselves out of continuing before they ever learn it, we find a long-awaited note of subtlety. But not enough to redeem the foregoing two hours.