by
Douglas Messerli
Martin McDonagh
(writer and director) Three Billboards
Outside of Ebbing, Missouri / 2018
I
must admit, as I move into writing about Martin McDonagh’s 2017 film, Three
Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, that I am most definitely not a
McDonagh fan. His films and plays generally have the cynicism of Coen brothers,
without their stunning abilities to tell stories. Read my nearly outraged
review of his In Bruges.
Both play with broad caricatures, but the
Coens are clearly better in casting. But this time McDonagh has been lucky with
a kind-of Coen figure, Joel Coen’s brilliant wife, Frances McDormand, who
totally encompasses every figure she has ever played (I’ve seen perform her
with the Wooster Group at least 4 or 5 times). In McDonagh’s new work, she
plays a kind of Medusa named Mildred, whose heart has seemingly turned to stone
with the death of her daughter, who was raped while dying. Along with that
event and an ex-husband who has spent years abusing her, Mildred no longer has
any patience for the men in her life, particularly when one of the members of
the Ebbing, Missouri police force, a deputy named Dixon (Sam Rockwell), is also
a racist who clearly enjoys in beating up young black boys.
The well-liked local police chief,
Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) has almost let the search for her daughter’s
killer become a cold case. It’s not that he hasn’t tried, but simply that no
one locally has been a DNA match, and Mildred has been left alone to nurse her
pain with utterly no one to help except her kind-hearted son, Robbie (the
always charming Lucas Hedges).
From
the very start of McDonagh’s new film, he makes it clear that in the intense
period since the murder was first reported, Mildred has become a kind of local
volcano, ready to blow the entire community away in order to bring some
necessary changes to her lovely rural village.
But the fact is that Mildred is not only
explosive, but beneath her hard stare, her rough-hewn eyes and nose, is a
fiercely intelligent being who can fight it out with the best of them. She has
given up her soul so that in this small bigoted and patriarchally controlled
village she might survive. What she perhaps really needs is an ally or soulmate
like Marge Gunderson of the Coens’ Fargo (a
character also played by McDormand) But she surely won’t find one in Ebbing,
particularly after she hits upon the idea of renting three billboards just out
side of town upon which she places three proactive messages, dark black upon
blood-red: “Raped While Dying”; “And Still No Arrests?”; “How Come, Chief
Willoughby?”
Yes, as The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis observes, this is her way
of reawakening the search and, simultaneously, relieving some of her deeply
felt sorrow. But it’s not a popular action in a small town that knows nearly
everything about everyone, including the fact that the well-meaning Willoughby
is not only a loving husband and father, a man who also, incidentally, is
attempting to reign-in his equally angry assistant, Dixon, but also is dying of
cancer. The townies take out their anger at Mildred by bullying behavior of her
son at school, and various other modes of intimidation, including a
Sadomasochist dentist, a slightly mad former soldier evidently living in Idaho,
and Dixon himself, who nearly kills the young man who has rented the
billboards, and who also attempts, spurned on by his evil mother, to burn down
the billboards.
Everyone
in this small town seems to be just at the edge of sanity, with all of them so
deeply hurt that one might even imagine this is the story of so many small
American communities being destroyed by the opioid crisis and lack of jobs.
Well, Midwest America has always been a paradisal world in which innocent
people are tortured and destroyed. Even the urbane Truman Capote knew that;
after all, he had grown up in the deeply dark American South. I spent much of
my early life drawing those very connections, and they’re still there today.
Small town American simply ain’t always nice.
If McDonagh’s script is all a little pat,
with even the police chief coming to her rescue to pay for the billboard’s
second month, and a friendly black boy showing up at her door with a duplicate
pair of the billboard messages after Dixon has burned them down. And, as Dargis
makes clear, the writer-director does not always know what to cut from his own
all-to-clever and convenient plot, mixing comedy and horror with equal blends,
as if he were simply brewing up a new cup of coffee.
Mildred
is a horror, surely, particularly in the mind-throttling society in which she
lives, but McDonagh almost turns her into a monster, allowing his character to hurtle
Molotov cocktails into the police station and almost killing Dixon, who,
although fired, has returned late at night to pick up a letter Willoughby has
left him after killing himself.
Fortunately, McDormand saves the day. One
scene, in particular, reveals her ability to suck in all her hate and come
through as an almost charming and, at instants, as a quite visually beautiful
woman. Sitting at a local steak house with a dwarf, Peter Dinklage (McDonagh
seems to have a “thing” about little people, featuring a scene in his In Bruges as well), she observes her
ex-husband (John Hawkes) arriving with his current 19-year old girlfriend. When
her dinner, interrupted by her former husband, turns sour, she picks up a
bottle of wine and walks steadily to the banquette in the back of the
restaurant; she has already showed herself as a truly violent being, and we
half-expect that she is about to break the contents of that bottle over her
ex’s head. His clueless and nearly brainless girlfriend, Penelope (Samara
Weaving) suddenly admits that her comment, “Hate only begets hate,” was
something she had stolen from an article in an essay on “Polio,” which turns
out to have been an article about “Polo.” Slowly, as the camera pulls away from
this ditz of a being, McDormand carefully puts down the bottle of wine next to
her insufferable ex-husband, and commands him to be nice to her, as if
relinquishing any rights to her former anger about their relationship. He is
now the one in hell, tied to a mindless girl that will surely allow him no
satisfaction except in bed.
Whether or not such hate as both she and
Dixon share can be redeemed, McDonagh fails to answer, as the two speed off to
perhaps kill a man who they believe guilty of rape, even if he has not been the
one to have killed and raped Mildred’s daughter. Both have second thoughts, and
we can only hope that the voyage they are taking is a kind of short road trip
that will salve their mutual angers, allowing them to return home with a new
acceptance of life as it is, a kind of aborted Odyssey. In the end, despite
McDonagh’s constant insertion of comic elements into his work, I believe that Three Billboards is a kind of redemptive
blood tragedy.
Los Angeles,
December 26, 2017
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2017).
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