Frances McDormand is an embodiment of maternal anger and defiance, of the weight of grief and guilt, which often comes in tandem. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, her sorrow, festered into rage, is the emotional epicentre of the film that strives to quake all the American fault lines, moral, racial and political, and she gives a gut-punching performance in a classic feminist register that, as we have seen, eventually won her an Oscar.
In the now iconic overall, McDormand plays Mildred, the mother who rents three billboards to rebuke the police for failing to arrest any suspect for the rape and murder of her daughter. Her main target is Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the chief of police in this small town in the Midwest. The three billboards, with black letters on red, spell out the visceral detail of the crime and attack the authorities for their failure to act. "Raped while dying", "And still no arrest", "How come, Chief Willoughby?". (The three-part reproach has inspired many real-life imitations since the film came out; we can easily imagine a Thai version).
In the age of mob justice aided by social media, renting physical billboards to humiliate the police seems archaic, slow, without enough "reach" -- and yet it's deeply satisfying seeing those words in print. Mildred's expressed anger sparks a backlash when most of the townspeople turn against her, mainly because Chief Willoughby is well-liked by everyone, a family man with sardonic humour who has devoted himself to the community. It's also because -- in one of the film's many contrivances that somehow diminish its power to rattle -- the chief has cancer and is dying.
Writer-director Martin McDonagh's construction of the story has the calculated precision of a playwright, where every character signifies something in the psychological matrix and where coincidences are labelled as fate. The dialogue is crisp, weighed with meaning, and the humour stings. But it's also over-plotted, and it's only the dedicated performances of McDormand, Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell, who also won an Oscar for playing a racist cop called Dixon, that prevent the whole enterprise from sliding into something ridiculous. While this is an entertaining film that flips between dark comedy and raw drama, in retrospect it's also a schematic moral fable in which redemption (and confession of a killer) comes almost too easily.
The line that blurs the good and the bad in Three Billboards is hazy, and everyone has baggage that weighs him or her down. That, too, is ingenious writing or a dull conceit. Mildred at first emerges a heroine who stands up against injustice and inefficiency, before her bottled-up rage pushes her across the line. Chief Willoughby, for all his inability to solve the crime, is a warm-hearted tough-talker -- a good sheriff and an even better man, in short. The apparent villain is Dixon, whose chip on the shoulder is too big for him to discard, and whose bigotry is the loud, uninhibited kind that liberal newspapers on the East Coast would fine easy to mock. One of the much-discussed points is how come this town's racist gets off the hook so conveniently -- it did bug me, too.
Some of the best scenes are when Mildred and Willoughby come face to face. They are two people who live with pain and grief, the two invisible emotions that struggle to find a visible expression, and deep down they understand each other: why she is so angry, and why he is so embarrassed and frustrated. The two performers, McDormand and Harrelson, opt for two different channels: she's the stone-faced mother whose sorrow has boiled into cold-eyed fury, and he's a dying father who chooses to laugh at life. I wonder why Harrelson wasn't even a contender in the awards season; Rockwell is solid and he continues to surprise us, yes, but Harrelson gives the film half of its soul.
McDonagh, who's from England, is known for his dark comedy In Bruges, about a guilt-ridden hitman hiding out in a small Belgian town, and Seven Psychopaths, about a screenwriter dragged into the LA underworld after a dog kidnapping stunt. Three Billboards is larger in scope, range and star power, with a story that touches on the hot buttons of race and police brutality in the US, and like a seasoned playwright he unveils his narrative through tight scene-setting, sharp dialogue, and bursts of unexpected violence. This is the kind of high middlebrow film that thrives in the Oscars season, with its architecture a little too neat, too manipulated, and our memory of it will only revolve around its memorable performers.
