Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Martin McDonagh (2017)
Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) rents three billboards near her home in Ebbing, Missouri. The notices she has posted on them – ‘Raped while dying’, ‘And still no arrests’, ‘How come, Chief Willoughby?’ – refer to the assault and murder of Mildred’s teenage daughter Angela, seven months previously. Even before these words appear on them, the hoardings have something to say: the dim palimpsest of old adverts indicates their long disuse. And it’s not long before the billboards in Martin McDonagh’s film have become a truly formidable image, from two aspects. Mildred’s angry messages – black letters on a red ground – are decidedly confrontational. The structures holding them, viewed from the back, take on the look of stark memorials. (Reduced in size in a long shot, they bring to mind the three dark-framed photographs among Lee Chandler’s few possessions in Manchester by the Sea.) The billboards’ quality of sadness derives mainly from the tragedy that has consumed Mildred’s life but their desuetude (it turns out they last advertised in 1986) adds to it, implies that Ebbing is a place somehow left behind. It’s pointed out to Mildred – though she’s already well aware – that few vehicles nowadays use the road the billboards stand beside. Posting the notices, although it may therefore be a futile gesture from the point of view of getting justice for Angela Hayes, has an impact nevertheless. Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the Ebbing police chief, is well respected and popular with the local community, who take it as read that he’s been doing his best to find Angela’s killer. It’s common knowledge too that Willoughby is terminally ill. Mildred – later described as the woman ‘who never smiles’ – has a proven talent for falling out with people, including her now ex-husband (also an ex-cop) Charlie (John Hawkes). The billboards widen the scope of her unpopularity.
Although the time is the present, McDonagh augments a sense of the place being part of the past by referring to genres with strong traditions in film history. Ebbing has a one-horse-town look about it and Frances McDormand, from the moment Mildred walks into the local advertising agency to inquire about renting the billboards, the uncompromising expression and wary but ready-for-a-fight gait of a Western protagonist. It’s clear the agency doesn’t get a lot of business. Until Mildred enters, the young manager Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones) has been sitting at his desk reading a book by Flannery O’Connor: this hints at Southern Gothic elements to follow (even if this is technically the Midwest). The O’Connor book is A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories and the name of the title story reflects a major part of the moral scheme of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Halfway through, Sheriff Willoughby takes his own life, though not before writing a series of notes that confirm he was a good man, personally and professionally. Willoughby’s legacy encourages junior police officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) to turn from crass racist hothead, ridiculous mother’s boy and Mildred’s chief antagonist into something more uncertain. Jason starts to find – though it’s hard to find – the good man in himself.
I’ve not seen either of Martin McDonagh’s two previous features, In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), or any of his stage plays, but his reputation for gruesome, jet-black comedy precedes him: the morally upward trajectory of Three Billboards outlined above therefore comes as a surprise. One of this film’s fascinations is the unresolved tension between the writer-director’s misanthropic impulses and humanist efforts. As those words imply, the former come more naturally to McDonagh. He shows – even shows off – a flair for foul-mouthed dialogue that crackles with often nasty wit. He’s also keen for his angry characters to express themselves through physical as well as verbal violence. When her dentist (Jerry Winsett) complains to the police about the billboards, Mildred makes an appointment to see him and, while she’s in the chair, grabs a dental drill and drives it into his thumbnail. As she drops her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) off at school, someone throws a can at their car. She gets out and accosts the two kids she thinks responsible; she knees both of them, a boy and a girl, in the groin. When Jason Dixon learns of Willoughby’s suicide, he wrongly assumes it’s the result of the billboard notices, goes to the advertising agency and hurls Red out of an upstairs window before going downstairs to kick his unconscious body.
McDonagh nevertheless wants to find more in his characters than first meets the eye (and ear) and to show them capable of the unexpected. This works easily with Mildred: her views on law enforcement are illiberal, to put it mildly, but she is, from the start, predominantly a grieving mother – we expect to see beyond and beneath her anger. It’s just about plausible that Chief Willoughby, in the note that he leaves for Mildred, not only assures her that his suicide is unrelated to the billboard notices but also reveals himself to be her mystery benefactor. (When Red demands an extra month’s rental, in the hope Mildred won’t be able to pay for the notices to stay up, the money required arrives on cue, with an anonymous letter.) McDonagh’s approach is less effective in the case of Jason, who requires radical treatment in order to become a reformed character. Even though he doesn’t undergo a Damascene conversion, his evolution is imposed on the story rather than humanly convincing.
His change of heart is prompted by the letter that Willoughby leaves for Jason, telling him that he’ll realise his potential as a detective only if he lets go of hate and learns to love. Up to this point, however, Jason has shown nil potential for effective police work and not only because he can’t control his temper: he’s presented as comically thick too. Willoughby’s successor Abercrombie (Clarke Peters) fires him for the assault on Red but Jason, who conveniently still has his keys to the place, enters the otherwise deserted police station after dark to find and read Willoughby’s letter. He does so just as Mildred, on the opposite side of the street, starts throwing Molotov cocktails at the station, in revenge for her billboards being set on fire – an act for which she assumes the police were responsible. Jason emerges from the blazing station with severe burns but with the Angela Hayes case files that he’s clutching, intact. In hospital, he shares a room with Red, who’s forgiving enough to pour him a glass of orange juice (and is never seen again). McDonagh’s plotting is cavalier by now: Jason, in view of the severity of his injuries, is discharged improbably quickly. We next see him in a bar, eavesdropping on a conversation between two men one of whom – unbeknown to Jason – previously threatened Mildred in the local gift shop where she works part-time. Jason now hears him talking about an assault on a girl some months back. After taking his car details (the vehicle has an Idaho license plate), Jason, convinced that he’s Angela’s killer, provokes a fight with the man. Jason comes off worse but comes away with a DNA sample, which he takes to Abercrombie.
Martin McDonagh is well aware of the expectations his taste for mayhem are setting up in the audience. After the sequence at the dentist’s and the grievous bodily harm Jason inflicts on Red, you fear the worst when the creepy man (Brendan Sexton III) confronts Mildred in the gift shop; when Mildred, having discovered it was her ex-husband who set fire to her billboards, brandishes a wine bottle as she approaches the restaurant table where Charlie and his new girlfriend (Samara Weaving) are sitting; when Jason phones Mildred with the bad news that the sample he obtained doesn’t match the DNA found on Angela’s body. As his mother (Sandy Martin) dozes in her chair, Jason sits with a rifle close enough at hand to follow Willoughby’s lead and blow his own brains (or his mother’s) out. In all three instances, McDonagh refrains from bloodshed – to real effect. He’s also both too smart and too divided to deliver a facile upbeat ending, although what he goes for instead is in some ways unconvincing. Taking the view that the man they suspected has raped someone, even if not Angela, Mildred and Jason decide to drive together to Idaho to kill him. This is hard to credit, even allowing that both have hitherto used violence to get things off their chest. It seems particularly improbable that Mildred would leave her teenage son in order to undertake such a mission. As they start their drive, Mildred confesses to Jason that she started the fire at the police station; he replies that he already knows. They both then voice second thoughts about the planned Idaho homicide but agree that they can decide en route. As I watched this ending, I felt it was a copout. In retrospect, I like it better – if only as an admission on McDonagh’s part that, like his protagonists, he wasn’t sure what to do next.
Frances McDormand may not have the greatest character range but she’s just about peerless playing tough, ornery women. She was remarkable in the title role in Olive Kitteridge (2014), the HBO mini-series adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel. When the sour misanthrope Olive ruled the domestic roost, she could be a pain; when she was in a position of social vulnerability, as at her son’s posh wedding, McDormand made her extraordinarily moving. Mildred Hayes’s plight in Three Billboards is so grim that it’s hard not to root for her throughout, however unreasonable and destructive her behaviour may be. McDormand creates a vivid portrait of a woman fuelled by angry grief but McDonagh does well to suggest that Mildred was never easy to get on with. He does so in an upsetting flashback to an argument with Angela (Kathryn Newton), who storms out of the house yelling ‘I hope I get raped on the way home’. (It’s not explicit that this argument occurred the night that Angela was raped and died but you assume so.) Frances McDormand’s acting appears to be technically simple but its emotional impact is powerful. The characters she plays often have a built-in bullshit detector; the actress has an early warning system when sentimentality threatens. The outstanding example of this in Three Billboards comes when Mildred, tending the potted shrubs she gets for the ground around the billboards, starts talking to a lone female deer that wanders into the area. ‘You’re not trying to make me believe in reincarnation, are you?’ she says to the deer, ‘Because you’re pretty but you ain’t her’. McDormand’s face has registered the thought even before she speaks this line.
Sam Rockwell’s performance as Jason is the most strongly felt I’ve seen him give although the awards he’s winning have, I think, as much to do with the character’s ‘redemption’ as with the quality of Rockwell’s acting – the role gives him plenty of opportunities for grandstanding, which he always takes. Woody Harrelson has played plenty of men with anger management problems before so it’s refreshing to see him succeed in the role of an emotionally solid counterweight to the principals. One of the strongest moments in the film comes when Chief Willoughby, while questioning Mildred about the incident with the dentist, suddenly coughs up blood that spatters her forehead. Though they both knew he was dying, they’re shocked into an instantly different mood: horrified and embarrassed, he mutters a quiet apology; she involuntarily expresses compassionate sympathy. For the most part, though, Willoughby is resolutely calm, even as he prepares to kill himself, after spending an idyllic day with his wife Anne (an awkward Abbie Cornish) and daughters. (He ends his life in preference to letting it run its full course in miserable pain and indignity.) As in Manchester by the Sea, Lucas Hedges gets the most out of sarcastic one-liners thanks to perfect deadpan delivery. It’s a pity, though understandable, that the role isn’t larger but Hedges skilfully suggests Robbie’s confusion of feelings. He is exasperated and embarrassed by Mildred’s a-mother’s-gotta-do-what-a-mother’s-gotta-do behaviour yet he’s loyal to her. He becomes more subdued as he gradually recognises that his own grieving has to take second place to hers. McDonagh skimps even more on Charlie and there’s not a lot John Hawkes can do with him. The most crudely conceived character is Charlie’s nineteen-year-old airhead girlfriend Penelope, though Samara Weaving plays her with creditable empathy. In the smaller parts, Željko Ivanek, as a desk sergeant at the police station, does particularly well.
The limited conception of certain other roles is more problematic because it’s politically correct. There are three African-Americans and they are all intelligent and decent – nothing less, nothing more – although McDonagh writes himself into a corner with Abercrombie. In spite of the new chief’s brains and integrity, Ebbing policing is just as hopeless after he arrives. Jason doesn’t face charges for his assault on Red, even though it’s witnessed by Abercrombie. The latter is fobbed off too with Mildred’s comically flimsy alibi for the attack on the police station. The two other blacks are Denise (Amanda Warren), who runs the gift shop, and Jerome (Darrell Britt-Gibson), who works with Red and who, when Charlie’s arson destroys the billboard notices, saves the day when he informs Mildred that it’s standard practice to get a reserve set printed. It would be easier to accept the African-American characters’ lack of negative qualities if McDonagh wasn’t so keen on drawing attention to the shortcomings of white ones. His approach to James (Peter Dinklage) is similarly condescending. James, who quietly carries a torch for Mildred, supplies her with a false alibi for the Molotov cocktail attack; as a reward, she goes out for dinner with him. Charlie and Penelope are in the same restaurant; Charlie comes over to Mildred and James’s table to make fun of their date and spit out vicious dwarfist insults. After a row with Mildred, James leaves the restaurant with the parting shot, ‘I know I’m a midget who sells used cars and has a drinking problem – I know that’. His self-awareness is an empty sophistication on McDonagh’s part. Well as Peter Dinklage plays James, the viewer is meant to feel purely sorry for him because he’s a midget.
Apart from the great billboards, there’s not a lot of texture to the locale though McDonagh animates the bars and diners through his excellent choice of music playing in them (The Four Tops’ ‘Walk Away Renee’, Joan Baez’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’). This and Carter Burwell’s score, though it’s not one of his strongest, are more effective than the traditional Irish melody ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ used for the introduction and subsequently: perhaps this means something personally to Martin McDonagh but it doesn’t connect to the culture of the people on the screen. The black comedy and the straight drama sides of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri don’t mesh either but much of the acting, the story and the title trio make the film compelling.
7 January 2018