by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
screened the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri with our friend Garry, who’d been talking it up to
us for months, and while it’s far from the usual Christmas night fare, it
turned out to be a marvelous movie whose only real flaw is its relentless
astringency. The central premise is that eight months previous to the start of
the action a teenage girl named Angela Hayes (Kathryn Newton, who’s dead at the
start of the film but we get to see her in a flashback) went off alone one
night and was kidnapped, raped and burned to death. The central character is
her mom Mildred (Frances McDormand, top-billed and an Academy Award winner for
this film), who is understandably upset that in the eight months since Angela’s
murder the police have done virtually nothing on the case. So she rents three
dowdy, long-unused billboards in the deserted part around Ebbing where the
crime took place, calling on the police to do something at long last to solve
it: RAPED WHILE DYING, STILL NO ARREST, and HOW COME, CHIEF
WILLOUGHBY? The last is a reference to
William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), chief of police in Ebbing, who also keeps
horses outside of town, is married to a much younger woman and has been
diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. In one confrontation scene with
Mildred, he literally coughs blood in her face.
Willoughby assigned the case to
officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell in a superb performance, miles away from his
equally marvelous taciturnicity in Duncan Jones’ sci-fi film Moon), who specializes in “nigger-torturin’” and lives
with his even more fearsome mother (Sandy Dixon), who tells him he can’t use
the N-word anymore and he should say “people of color-torturin’” instead.
(Actually the euphemism should be “Using enhanced interrogation techniques on
people of color.”) The billboards cause an immediate sensation across Ebbing,
with some residents demanding they be taken down because they’re a tasteless
attack on a cop who’s not only doing his best but is dying of cancer. As the
film progresses Mildred’s monomania crosses so many lines it’s hard for us to
maintain our sympathy for her. Not that anyone else in the movie comes off much
better: at one point Dixon confronts Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the rather
milquetoast advertising agent who sold Mildred the billboards, and pitches him
out the window of his second-floor office. Mildred is also raising Angela’s
brother Jerome (Darrell Britt-Gibson) as a single parent since his and Angela’s
dad Charlie (John Hawkes) left her for an affair with a 19-year-old named
Penelope (Samara Weaving) after Mildred threw him out for regularly abusing
her. We get to see his temper and her icy cool when Charlie stops by Mildred’s
home one day in which the confrontation gets so violent Charlie holds a knife
to Mildred’s neck and their son has to rescue her — and just then Penelope,
who’s been waiting in Charlie’s car all this time, comes in and asks if she can
use the bathroom.
It’s a grim story that escalates when, after Willoughby
shoots himself because he doesn’t want to deal with the ordeal of dying a slow,
painful death, he leaves Mildred enough money to keep the billboards up — and
the state sends in a Black man to replace Willoughby in a scene that, though
carefully not played for laughs, still
came awfully close to Cleavon Little’s entrance into Rock Ridge in Blazing
Saddles. Then someone sets fire to
the billboards, only the signage is covered by insurance and Mildred is able to
put them back up with the aid of the town dwarf, James (Peter Dinklage). In
just about any other movie the avuncular African-American authority figure
would re-launch the investigation into Angela’s murder and find the culprit; in
this one Jason, who’s been fired from the police force for making a snippily
racist comment to his new Black boss, overhears two men in a bar bragging about
a crime that’s eerily similar to Angela’s murder and he’s convinced that one of
the men is her killer — only by this time Jason is badly burned because he was
in the police station when Mildred, seeking revenge for the burning of her
billboards, throws Molotov cocktails into the Ebbing police station. It’s unclear
whether writer/director Martin McDonagh meant for Mildred to attack Jason on
purpose or whether she was planning an Earth Liberation Front-style attack that
would destroy the police station but not actually hurt anybody because it would
be closed. The new chief dashes Jason’s hope that he’s solved the crime by
telling him the DNA sample he obtained by engaging the suspect in a bar fight
does not match the DNA from
Angela’s crime scene, but Jason insists that the man must be guilty of something and the film has an ambiguous ending with Jason
and Mildred driving off together to Idaho (the man had been driving a truck
with Idaho plates) in search of him.
Three Billboards has often been mistaken for a Coen Brothers film,
not only because Mrs. Joel Coen is the star but also because it has the same
mix of small-town incestuousness (Ebbing is depicted as the sort of town in
which everyone knows everyone else’s business), grim reality and black humor
that has marked the Coen brothers’ output. McDonagh reportedly based his film
on a true story that happened in Vidor, Texas in 1991 (did the name have a
family connection with Texas-born classic-era director King Vidor?), but
ironically the true story comes closer to movie cliché than the version
McDonagh concocted: the real killer in Vidor was a member of a prominent,
wealthy family and the authorities came together to protect the 1-percenter who
committed the crime. Indeed, according to a “trivia” post on imdb.com, the real
billboards in Vidor were still up when the movie was made. Three Billboards is one of those movies that seems to deny the very
existence of human kindness or
compassion (and in that regard it’s an appropriate film for the Trump-era Zeitgeist), but that didn’t bother me as much as it has in
some other recent films in which I’ve complained that there’s no one in the dramatis
personae we actually like (we’re clearly meant at first to see Mildred as a sympathetic character, but she
doesn’t let us for very long, and for me her character was “nailed” when one of
the other people in the film pointed out that we never see her smile), and within that limit it’s
actually powerful drama with two tour de force performances, McDormand’s and Rockwell’s. It also
turned out to be an unexpectedly au courant movie for the year (2017) that marked the downfall
of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement: after all, it is about
a woman who takes on the male establishment to demand that they take seriously
a crime of sexual violence against a female victim, and uses the tools
available to her to publicize male law enforcement’s failure and disinterest in
solving a crime against a woman!
