Three Billboards
Outside Ebbing, Missouri (dir. Martin McDonagh, 2017) is a character drama
focused on Mildred (Frances McDormand), the mother of a young woman who was
raped, murdered, and burned seven months or so before the time of the narrative,
and a short-tempered, not especially intelligent deputy sheriff, Dixon (Sam
Rockwell) who has a reputation for roughing up people he’s arrested, especially
black people. The mother’s impatience over the failure of the local police to
arrest the murderer-rapist has driven her to the edge of reason. The deputy sheriff remains on the force only
out of the tolerance, or negligence, of the sheriff, Willoughby (Woody
Harrelson), who is dying of pancreatic cancer.
To prod the sheriff into action, Mildred pays for three billboards to be
set up on a little-used road outside town.
She pays for them with money from the sale of her ex-husband’s
truck. He recently divorced her to marry
a 19-year old who is about as dim a bulb as one can be. There are redemptive moments
in the film, and acts of vengeance. The
letters Sheriff Willoughby wrote to be delivered to certain principal
characters after his suicide add to the redemptive potential. As these comments suggest, there is
considerable melodrama in this film, which is among other things about the
destructive effects of revenge both on the target and the person seeking
vengeance. Small revelations here and there (for example, the argument Mildred
had with her daughter right before she is killed) deepen the melodrama and at
moments threaten to overwhelm the plot’s credibility.
One might describe this film as a dark comedy. I’d rather describe it as a dark melodrama
with moments of comedy. Almost all the characters
have some aspect of comedy in them—the mother’s fearlessness; the sheriff’s sense
of humor; the deputy’s absolute buffoonishness. But no important moment of plot
turns on comedy. Though people in the
theater laughed when the mother firebombed the police station, that laughter
was stifled by awareness that someone was in the station. It’s darkly funny when the severely wounded
ex-deputy is placed in the same hospital room with the young owner of the
billboard company whom he had previously thrown through a second-floor window. But
then it’s not really funny.
The movie totters uneasily between tragedy and comedy,
melodrama and farce (though it never really comes close to comedy or farce). I
appreciate genre-bending, but I’m not sure that’s what we have here.
This is not a film set up for a sequel, yet indeterminate
details could provide grounds for one (I don’t expect or hope for one). The film ends as Mildred and Dixon drive
towards another town where they plan to kill the man they believe is
responsible for killing her daughter. Both
are having second thoughts about their intentions, but the film ends on that uncertain
note, and we never know what they decide. After Willoughby’s death, a black man
is appointed sheriff. How? Why? He’s had
no role in the police force earlier.
None of the officers want him giving them orders (they are all
racists). What’s the consequence? What’s
the purpose? When the new sheriff approaches Mildred after the firebombing of
police headquarters, she is his obvious prime suspect, yet he chooses to
believe the testimony of a friend that he and Mildred were out on a date when
the bombing happened. How? Why? And why is
this person a midget, played by Peter Dinklage? Is he there mainly to provide comic
justification for a few jokes about Mildred’s date with a midget? (He corrects
her use of the word midget: he is a dwarf).
When Dixon overhears a man in a bar apparently bragging
about his involvement in a rape and murder whose victim could have been
Mildred’s daughter, he contrives, somewhat improbably, to retrieve a bit of the
man’s DNA (he does so in a fight). Yet DNA tests do not show a match with DNA
on the victim’s body. Somewhat earlier
in the film, Mildred is visited in the store where she works by a man who
alludes to his possible involvement in her daughter’s death—this is the same
man whom Dixon heard bragging in the bar.
As a result, he and Mildred plan to kill him. There is no explanation
for this discrepancy.
Willoughby is another loose end: he seems to be, in many
ways, the most human and level-headed person in the film. He loves his family, he tries to do a good
job as sheriff, he is upset by but tolerant of the billboards Mildred places
outside the town. When he kills himself,
he has written a number of letters to people in the town, including Mildred and
Dixon, that cause them to think about the nature of their lives and
directions. For Dixon, that letter (I
think we are supposed to feel) prompts a change in his character. (Whether we’re supposed to find his capability
for change as credible is another matter).
Yet Willoughby tolerates Dixon’s presence on the police force—he did not
fire him after he abused the black prisoner.
How do we account for this? The film does not explain. There are enough
of these weird inconsistencies that I wondered whether they resulted from a
sloppy script or from a deliberate portrayal of the unresolved and incomplete
details of most events. Several turns of
plot are so obviously telegraphed in advance by earlier moments that I wanted
to groan. Should I have? Or were these
moments self-referential allusions to the film’s text, to all texts?
Characters saved the film for me: major and minor characters. Excellent performances by Frances McDormand
and Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson and many of the minor characters, even the
dimly lit 19-year old. Mildred is full of grief and hate, and McDormand seems
utterly believable as these emotions gradually distort her. Her character in
particular is isolated from everyone: she likes the sheriff even though her
public billboard messages blame him for the failure of the investigation into
her daughter’s death. The town resents
the billboards she’s put up because of their sympathies for the dying Willoughby.
She’s alienated her own son, who has to go to school every day to be bullied by
classmates about her latest acts. She’s briefly arrested for attacking a fat
dentist (the film insists on the words “fat dentist”) who has filed a complaint
about the billboards (and also who nearly drills into her teeth without
anesthetizing her).
There has been a good bit of commentary about the film’s
treatment of racial themes. Basically,
it shows us a racist small town in Missouri, with citizens who talk like
racists, with a deputy sheriff (Dixon) who had gotten into trouble for beating black
people. But it doesn’t seem to do much
with these details. Dixon’s abusive
treatment of black prisoners is part of his much larger pattern of violence,
alcoholism, short-temperedness, worthlessness.
If there is anyone to dislike early in the film (other than the murderer
of Mildred’s daughter, and we don’t know his identity), it is Dixon. Yet the
film suggests that the receipt of Willoughby’s letter is enough to make him
reconsider his ways. It is the failure of the film, in the view of those who
have faulted it, for failing to somehow criticize or punish the racists. Many small rural towns (though not all) are
marked by racism. In dramas set in such
towns, racism is going to be an inevitable part of the scene, regardless of
whether racism is the subject. Are such films obliged to make comment in such
instances? In Three Billboards, it’s
possible that the failure to make more of racism than it does is itself a
comment (that racism is ubiquitous), but to what end I am not sure. Can such
films rely on the conscience of its viewers to react against racism, even if
the film doesn’t overtly do so? It’s worth noting also that the film asks us to
see Mildred as the hero even when her desire for justice morphs into a desire
for revenge that so totally distorts her character than she totters on the
verge of sanity. If Dixon is a deranged racist, Mildred is a deranged
psychopath. I respect her desire and need for justice, but not her desire for Old
Testament revenge. One of the best commentaries
critical of the film I’ve read is by Alissa Wilkinson in Vox.[i]
She also cites a BullFeed article by Alison Wilmore which I found intelligent.[ii]
Qualms aside, this was one of the better films I’ve seen in
a while. It’s messy. It’s moving, mysterious, philosophical, and human.
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